Zazen - By Vanessa Veselka Page 0,62

it up from the restaurants and run it in the secondary tanks.”

I followed her to the garage where another old Mercedes was being converted to run on fryer oil. The work areas were immaculate. Every tool had a place and every drawer was labeled.

We talked about the war and people we knew in common. Who was leaving and wasn’t. She said if she had to go anywhere it would be Columbia or Chiapas. We decided that the general consensus in our demographic was Nepal or Costa Rica. I told her about Mr. Tofu Scramble and how he wanted Sri Lanka for the curry but couldn’t take the monsoons.

“Yeah. I don’t really mind people like that leaving. They’re all born landlords anyway. I mean have you ever had a your rent raised more often than when a hippy owns the building? ‘I’m sorry but I got to, man.’ They should have it on their fucking tombstones.”

We walked out onto the dirty snow in front of the garage.

“People like you, though, it’s different,” she said. “Are you really going to leave?”

“No.”

I felt ashamed for even thinking about it.

“Well, if you are staying, you can’t just be out alone or you’ll go crazy. For instance,” she paused, “one person could never have set off those bombs in town, not without casualties. It took lot of people working smart together to pull that off.”

The air electrified. It was the closest she’d come to admitting involvement. I wasn’t sure what to say because I realized then that I didn’t actually want to know.

Tamara looked out over the gray and white land.

“It’s just something you’ll need to think about sometime,” she said and started walking again. “For your own sanity.”

We spent another hour going around the property and looking at all the stuff they built or were working on. They made their own beer, jam and goat cheese. There was a slaughterhouse several hundred yards away where the creek turned south, a one-room brick building flush with the horizon line. Tamara said they butchered and skinned whatever they shot hunting right on the property. Deer mostly, and used everything but the teeth, which they kept in Mason jars over the fireplace.

“Britta says she’s going to do some big art project with them but I don’t think she’s going to get around to it for a while. Here.”

Tamara held out a jar of grooved yellow teeth.

“No thanks.”

She didn’t move. I thought she was joking.

“No really, no thanks.”

She didn’t move. I couldn’t figure out what she was doing or what she wanted from me. She just kept standing there with the deer teeth. Maybe I was tired, or just confused but I started to think that it might all be a test. Like she was the freaky homeless woman on the road with the magic charm that I don’t know I’ll need later but only get it if I do what she says now—TAKE THE DEER TEETH, DELLA! —And if I don’t it all vanishes, the goats, the crèche, the idea that something different is possible, all of it—TAKE THE DEER TEETH, DELLA! —And I’ll wake up in a convenience store parking lot. Blazing patio furniture on the traffic island and wearing nothing but my finest identity, a nosegay of slivered contrast unified by the ineffable mist of personhood. It was too much. In that moment I wanted to be on the farm and nowhere else. Tamara shook the jar at me.

I snatched the teeth out of her hands and opened it. They smelled like acrid leather. I think it was the iron in the blood.

Britta walked in. I felt instantly guilty. Like she was going to ask what I was doing with her deer teeth. But she didn’t fucking care. No one does. I live in my own goddamned world. I screwed the lid back on the jar and stomped upstairs embarrassed. I grabbed my rock hammer and notebook and went out over the snowy field, walking towards the bitterbrush. I stopped at every ridge that might be exposed rock. Anything I found that looked like it wasn’t mud I smashed with my hammer.

25 Disco

“All I know is I don’t want to be part of it. Not their power, not their plastic, not their food—fucking gross slavery meat.”

Astrid dropped her dishes into the soapy water. Her thin blonde hair was in pink plastic barrettes and she wiped her forehead on her upper arm.

Tamara laughed.

“Oh fuck primitivism!” she said, “Fuck Zerzan, Jensen and all those guys. I don’t