Zazen - By Vanessa Veselka Page 0,53
A BANK WHERE THE WILD THYME BLOWS…
27 NE EVEREST / 988 SE MARKAN DR. / 1031 SW TORRENT / 2847 NW GILLAHAN
I was eleven blocks from NE Everest. I ran. The police lines hadn’t closed yet and I made it through. Outside the perimeter it was dark and silent. There was no way for me to get home and no way for me to cross the river. If the Roseway Bridge was cut off, the South Bridge was too. I walked the remaining blocks to the pick-up site with my messenger bag pulled tight around me and my head and face down.
The pick-up site was a middle school playground. People were milling about under a covered basketball court. Maybe thirty or forty of them, all made of glass with flames dancing on their backs. I recognized some of them, a couple of neighborhood bike mechanics, some girls from the co-op, a guy that collected and sold scrap metal and his friend who was supposedly some big eco-terrorist. The woman who ran the tattoo shop was talking with two guys I knew from way back. One had gotten totally into urban biodynamic farming and I thought the other one was dead. Someone told me that, years ago. Meningitis.
The first driver pulled up and people surrounded his van. He said they were getting through. That the cops had closed off certain sections but didn’t have the numbers to really lock everything down. Too many officers were still out on the fires.
A second van pulled up behind the first and a third behind that. Most of us went in that first run. Some waited behind for friends who were still coming. I got into the third van with the girls from the co-op and the guy I thought was dead and we took off. We drove with our windows down and the lights off listening and feeling the city surrounding us as we passed.
The party was held at a warehouse next to a huge old public utility building that had been abandoned for years. The land around it was so thoroughly poisoned by chemicals that the city had condemned it pending federal funds for cleanup. They couldn’t even get crews to work on demolition there.
Mirror was standing in front of the main warehouse door in a pink and black striped top, go-go boots and fishnets with a cut out crotch. All pink to match. She waved the drivers over to a lot and went back inside.
We parked and as I got out the girls from the co-op pushed past me and ran laughing over the gravel and dust to the warehouse. I found Mirror right inside the huge hanger door talking with someone in a kitty collar. They were going to raise the cap. There were already about a hundred people there. I waited until she was done then stepped in close to Mirror.
“Have you seen Tamara?”
“That faggot isn’t coming.”
I felt the weight inside my body shift but I couldn’t tell if I was lighter or heavier. I stared at an abandoned substation adjacent to the parking lot.
“You know this whole area is a roiling caldera of toxins, right?”
“Fuck Hazmat. It’s not sexy.”
“Neither is respiratory failure.”
“Don’t eat the dirt.”
Mirror grabbed another girl in a kitty collar who was passing by, holding a basket full of bracelets.
“Pick a bracelet.”
The girl with the collar held the basket up and Mirror began digging through it. “Red is all access, open to anything. Blue is hetero only. Pink is girl on girl—don’t say it, I already gotten a rash of shit from the leather dykes—black is boy on boy, which doesn’t apply…Safety Orange means you just want to watch and probably shouldn’t be here anyway and you’re not wearing that one because I would never speak to you again if you did and…I guess that’s it. Red, blue or pink. Which is it?”
“Red,” I said and slipped the bracelet she handed me onto my wrist.
“Good girl,” Mirror nodded, “and if you get bored of being hit on by dudes you can always come back to the safe room and switch bracelets.”
Mirror let the girl with the kitty collar go and walked off herself in a different direction. I didn’t see her again for another two hours.
I walked into the safe room. It was filled with soft furniture low to the ground, worn out green couches and fraying velvet chairs. In the center was a dining table laid with tabouli, hummus, halvah, vegan cupcakes, tureens of carrot ginger