Zazen - By Vanessa Veselka Page 0,47
apartment when I finally yelled, “What the hell do you care about Manifestation anyway?”
“Nothing! I don’t care about it at all. It was a hoax. There’s nothing to care about.”
I wanted to push her down the stairs but my arms were full of boxes. I’m a foot taller. If I hit her it would hurt. I thought about that going down the stairs.
“And how do you know it’s a hoax?” I said. “Half the town is still blocked off.”
“Because they haven’t found a single bomb. They don’t even think it’s related to the parking garage or dog track.”
“They don’t know. It could be related.”
“Well, do you believe it is?” She stepped in front of me to push open the front door. “Or do you think it’s a hoax?”
The rain was so loud I could barely hear. I tried to go through but Tamara was holding the door and blocking it all at the same time.
“Well,” I said jamming her against the doorframe as I passed, “I don’t think it was a joke. I would have been scared if I was there. If someone called and said they were going to blow the place up. I would have been terrified.”
Tamara grinned flashing her broken incisor and moved aside.
Mirror backed the van over the curb and honked. We ran the boxes in off the porch. It was a fucking downpour. I could see Mirror in the front of the cab talking to someone on the phone and eating a cupcake.
“In fact,” I said throwing some boxes into the back, “I like what they’re doing,” I slammed the van door, “someone should be drawing those lines,” I was shouting, “pointing that stuff out. People should have to think about their world and if no one gets killed, even better.”
“Right,” Tamara yelled, “think. Think about it. Not do anything about it. If you like that stupid group so much why don’t you go join up. It couldn’t be that hard. I’m sure they have a blog.”
“Oh yeah it would have been much better if they actually blew up the dog track.”
“So you don’t believe they did it either,” she laughed.
“I don’t care who blew up the dog track! It wasn’t exactly a call for class war, now was it? I mean who even goes to the dog track? Poor, stupid, white people. They need to be organized, not traumatized over the death of their favorite dumb fucking anorexic greyhound.”
I stomped back up the stairs and was about to make another point, a really good one about vanguards as a sub-cultural delusion, when Mirror came in behind us, freaking out because the eyehooks at the warehouse weren’t going to hold and she wanted slings and a trapeze.
“Hang plants,” I said.
“It’s supposed to be sexy,” she screamed, “not some hippy soft porn garden scene. Nobody wants to look up and see ferns.”
“And what you’ve got can’t hold a person?”
“Not with the kind of torque we’re going to be putting on it.”
“Post a weight limit,” I said.
“The fucking fat chicks would slay me. Slain. I would be dead. No more parties. Ever. I would actually have to slit my own throat to have an afterlife.”
She kicked a box of glassware.
“This rain sucks and I’m totally going to get a yeast infection if I keep eating this much sugar.”
She threw the half-eaten cupcake in the trash.
The phone rang and she asked me to get it. It was Devadatta.
“Turn on the TV.”
“I don’t think there is a TV.”
Mirror made devil’s horns with her fingers to signify television.
“No. No TV.”
“Well, they blew up that temp agency. You know the one out by the malls, Brass Ring? They blew it up.”
“That was a hoax,” I said.
“I’m watching it now. The blast took out the whole front.”
Once, I fell into a frozen river. It was like that. I held the phone away from my ear. Tamara saw my face and came around behind me so she could hear too.
“Were there others?”
My voice was so quiet I’m surprised she could understand what I said.
“Yeah, they found another bomb in the Olde Towne Mall. You know where all the high school kids hang out? But they got that one before it went off.”
Tamara turned on the radio. There were two more, one by the loading dock of Transcontinental and the other in a small pho place that served over 100 kinds of bubble tea. I thought I heard one go off somewhere nearby but it was someone closing a door. Car engines sound like