Zazen - By Vanessa Veselka Page 0,87

speech glued into a new constructed meaning and I could see that we had only seconds, that she would do it, and then I would know beyond any doubt that the Wal-Mart was about to explode with all those kids inside. I’d wait with every muscle tense, my heart splayed helpless, a jellyfish on the sand. And then nothing would happen and I had no idea why.

Tamara might have planned to bomb the Wal-Mart and run into a technical snag. Or she might have changed her mind. Maybe she was just buying rope and forgot her bag inside. Maybe it was all going to happen tomorrow—I sat through every possibility, each a wild universe, a bomb threat? A Buzz Lightyear? O my monks, all is burning… The fear dissipated and the shame rose then it went the other way. Countless times, when I was on the verge of leaving, my thoughts would take a new form, new sight or sound or feeling or just a desire for it all to be true and the whole thing to blow up so that I wouldn’t have to wait like that anymore. And all of it would come back, the terrible conviction, and I’d run after it until it vanished again and I fell clutching, and what was the all that was burning? I saw a thousand specters and grabbed at 999 of them.

Hours after the store closed, a station wagon drove out onto the empty lot. It slowed to a stop in the middle and a man got out of it. He was in his forties, stout with thin hair. He came around the other side of the car and waited. A young girl climbed out and he handed her the keys. She got in the driver’s seat and he looked around, probably because it was past curfew. Then he got in beside her. She tried to start the car but it stalled. She tried it again and it went a few feet and stalled. Finally she got it going and lurched forward. She drove in a shaky line, then slammed on the breaks and stalled it again. I watched her like there was nothing between us, like we were inside each other.

At the end of an hour she could keep the car going. She drew lazy circles on the grid of the lot before pulling into a parking space and getting out.

After they left I was alone. I heard bullets and felt deep tremors in the earth but I didn’t move. Cady sat beside me and I was afraid that if I stirred for even a second, she would be gone. I stayed that way all night and let her leave on her own. Some things are so sad that they have no name. I have tried to name them and I can’t. I sat there and watched those things dissolve into that wasted land.

People will do anything. Smash a kid’s head against a rock. Maim silverbacks and drag them across a square. Run through landmines to protect someone they’ve never met. Waste their bodies on grace. A high wire, a hurdle, a diving plane. It’s chemistry and people are shifting compounds, not elements like I thought. Sitting up all night, watching the Wal-Mart fail to blow up, I saw an endless spectrum. I don’t mean some soft sell about life on the banks or shades of gray. What I saw was a spectacle. A death chamber. A chandelier. A thousand rooms. By the edge of an industrial park with my face burnt and my swollen duct-taped hands, I finally joined the human race. I became a tenant in that house.

I was not afraid of horror, I was afraid of beauty, of what it could do to me if I let it. I felt like a sun, expanding and brighter than anything. My fingertips burned and my red eyes looked over the emptiness. I cut the tape off my hands and watched the skin turn from white-blue to pale pink as blood flowed back into them.

The parking lot glistened, a black frozen lake. There was light atop the subdivisions. I stood up and fell over, scratching my face and neck on the clipped branches of the tangled shrubs. When I got back up my legs were on fire. I stamped my foot and millions of nails went through my sole fast enough to shatter my clay femur and I fell again.

There was a trickle of water. I hadn’t imagined it. It