Zazen - By Vanessa Veselka Page 0,46

nothing.”

Tamara handed him the menus. She sipped her green gin and read the local produce roster on the chalkboard by the bar.

“Squash, garlic, cilantro. Good, I like cilantro, kale, also very good.”

“If you’re such a revolutionary what’s your suggestion?”

“Chard, apple... Don’t know what I’d do. Have to think about it. Pretty sure it doesn’t have anything to do with committees and talking points. Fingerling potatoes. Aren’t they poisonous raw? You’re a scientist, Della, you should know.”

“Oh, you must be part of the underground no one’s ever heard about.”

“I don’t belong to any group outside of my friends.”

“That’s a real bridge builder.”

But it was a pretty hollow response. I wasn’t part of any group either, and not just because my wiring was shot and I cried all the time, but because I had never met anyone in any political organization that I liked. “Eat with your hands like the African people,” that’s what this one girl I knew used to say. Someone told me she referred to a fork as fascist. And they were all like that, macrobiotic Belgian trust-fund junkies, park bench anarchists, mean white lesbians in canvas clothing and dreadlocks—each ready to denounce you as a cop at the slightest sign of dissent. My dirty little secret was that I only liked militants at a distance. Up close I couldn’t stand them. Their targets were always the same, a cow path from the cell to the Great Reactionary Dawn. I wanted something more creative than dead clerks.

“So Della, on a similar note, what do you think will come from the demonstrations around the shootings? An editorial? An oversight committee? Constructive public outrage? ’Cause I’m betting on nothing.”

She took a bite of the seaweed the waiter brought.

“This is the grossest thing I’ve ever had. Try some.”

She pushed it toward me. I pushed it back.

Fucking Delphi of Gnostic Anarchism. Gatekeeper. Hey, I have to go now. I’m late for a hanging. Gonna celebrate the eight-hour day with some friends, you should totally come. Fucking elitist. Assuming I hadn’t thought about these kinds of things. But inside me something quivered. It was a road I had never gone down. My family has no patience for anarchists. Grace sent me to a Marxist reading group when I was sixteen so that I wouldn’t be tempted to become one. Credence didn’t have to go, the little loyalist. I remember when I showed up, this really sweet, old communist thought I was part of a youth brigade that didn’t exist. He’d talk for hours about revolutionary strategy. His analysis was flawless but it was like being forced to watch a starving polar bear clamber over breaking ice after a fat and agile sea lion. Nice left! Shame about all that saltwater. Ever thought about hunting in packs?

I was the polar bear. I got up.

“I told Mirror I’d help her move stuff for the party.”

“Good. Me too. We can go together.”

“Do what you want.”

Outside, the rain had stopped for the moment. The sky was dark gray but there were bands of pale light on the horizon. Driven against the ground, they brightened under the compression and made everything slightly blue. A bald man’s head went by, vivid as a robin’s egg.

“We can walk from here,” Tamara said.

It was raining heavily again by the time we got to the Cycle. We crossed a muddy inner courtyard. Wet chickens walked in jerky patterns through rows of vegetables and rainwater barrels. Mirror had everything stored in an uninhabited part of the squat and we walked into a common area that was once a lobby. Posters of bands and demonstrations, black silhouettes of raised fists and barbed wire, devil horns and drag races covered the walls. In the center of the room around a table two men and a woman sat rolling cigarettes and drinking coffee. One man introduced himself as Black Francis. The other, with ashen blond hair and pale skin, was Jules, and next to him was Britta, who had short henna-red hair, gray eyes, and a wide flat milky face. I knew a hundred people who looked like her.

“Come on!” yelled Mirror from the corridor ahead. “We only have the van for a few hours.”

We loaded the van with props, tools and decorations at the Cycle then hopped in and drove to Mirror’s place to get some boxes she had there. The whole way there Tamara couldn’t stop going off about the bomb threats and how pathetic they were. We were coming down the stairs of Mirror’s