11 Blackout Stars
A policeman with a wide nose and an oily forehead grabbed my arm.
“No one is leaving this block.
The woman who ran the salon started crying because she had to pick-up her kids and there was no one else to do it and I don’t know if the woman was tired or just scared but she went into hysterics, sat down on the curb, and wailed. Black tears poured down her face as her mascara ran. Thistles of kohl, briery eyes, she looked up and I saw the face of a saint martyred at the boundary of old and new. A patroness of New Honduras who would someday perform miracles for women stuck at work who could not pick up their kids from daycare in time.
“I can’t just stay here,” she sobbed.
“Nobody is leaving,” said the cop and walked away.
The Rat Queen shook her head in a shower of pennies and beads and scratched at the cinders of Old Honduras looking for her children too.
Police set up a barricade at one end of the street and another several blocks down in the other direction. Mirror hauled the Saint with the Black Tears back to the restaurant. I followed a few minutes later, walking through gusts of smoke. Chips of flaming auto shop whizzed by my head, most of them no bigger than a quarter. There was still some pink on the horizon but mostly it was night now. Above us stars were hidden in the haze.
Rise Up Singing was packed. The whole block was standing around eating vegan doughnuts waiting for a chance at the landline. Gangs, they said. But not everyone agreed. Insurance, some thought. One guy said developers but nobody believed him because that would just be too obvious. Mitch was giving away more food. Mirror was taking advantage of the situation to drive turnout for the sex party. “I’m gonna need a warehouse,” she said opening another bottle of champagne.
Jimmy called. I don’t know how she got through. She said it was getting live coverage. We could see the news trucks but the police told us they would give the interviews. Jimmy said barricades were going up all over the north part of town. Time of the Crickets. I asked her to call Annette and let her know I was okay.
The cops weren’t telling us anything and after a few more hours people had all kinds of dumb theories—bio-warfare testing site, elaborate casting call (we’re all going to be in a movie!), or my favorite, foreign invasion. Like some kind of maquiladora Kindertransport had gone rogue and taken a beachhead. But around 2 AM the cops let us go. It happened all of a sudden. There was a radio communication and they packed their bullhorns and their sawhorses, took down the barricades and left. When we walked outside the auto shop was a cinder and everything had a film of greasy smoke on it. People wandered off drunk and stunned.
“Just leave the doors unlocked,” said Mitch, “it doesn’t matter anyway.”
Mirror’s friend Jolie showed up in a Ford Econoline and they started packing up the dry goods and what was left of the food in the walk-in. Mitch gave me some white wine and an untouched vegan pineapple-lemon cake, both of which I put in my bike basket.
Devadatta was asleep in a booth with her mouth open. She was wearing a t-shirt that said “Reincarnation—You Asked For It.” Her scarf was on the ground and the tips of her long red hair lay like wet paintbrushes in a puddle of beer.
“Someone’s got to take her home,” said Mirror and woke her up.
But she was too drunk to stand on her own.
“I’ll take her,” I said.
Mirror helped me get Devadatta on her feet and we left.
I rolled my bike down the sidewalk with one hand on the handlebars and the other on Devadatta. I had to sidestep debris that was still hot and smoking faintly. Every now and then a little piece would pop and crack open near us and we’d jump. After a few blocks she began to get more lucid.
“You know, Devadatta isn’t my real name.”
We passed under the emergency lamp near the post office and she stopped, swaying slightly.
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Yeah, I picked it out when I was in high school,” she stopped to pant then got it together again, “My real name is Galaxy.”
“Galaxy?”
“Yeah. I wanted something less obvious. Devadatta was a disciple of Buddha.”
“The one who slandered him and took over his monastery?”
“That’s him,” she said, and threw up on the leg of a mailbox, “He wasn’t a very good disciple.”
She tilted her face up and closed her eyes. The moon was thin and her skin was green. I saw vines and coins growing up around her. She smiled and started to walk again.
“So you just liked the sound of it?”
“No. I like Devadatta. Can you imagine fighting Buddha?”
She dug in her bag and pulled out something wrapped in a napkin. It was a chocolate doughnut.
“I think it was a punk rock thing,” she said, taking a big bite, “I used to shave my head. Total straight-edge.”
A minute later she threw up in a storm drain and sat down. I sat on the curb beside her and opened one of the bottles of white wine. Devadatta rocked back and forth on her haunches with her head hanging down.
“Malasana. Deep squat,” she said, “Raina says it’s good for the root chakra. I think it’s helping.”
“Have you ever washed your hair with wine?”
“Beer. And eggs.”
“I’m going to try it,” I said.
I hung my head over the gutter and poured wine on my head. I twisted my hair around my hands and wrung the excess out. I shook my head. Drops of Chateau Montaigut went everywhere.
“Oh my god. I’m gonna throw up,” she said.
It was the smell of the wine, of course, but I had to get the dust of Old Honduras off of me otherwise I would never make it. I’d go extinct at the boundary like the rats and the blackberries and the blacks.
“Wait,” she put her hand up, “I’m okay.”
“Yeah,” I said wiping wine out of my eyes, “me too.”
Above us the night changed. Clouds from the south came in low. Devadatta pulled her sweater out of the bike basket and put it back on.
“Don’t you think it’s weird how the cops left like that?”
“It certainly wasn’t a gang thing.”
Devadatta looked down the street. The Roseway Bridge was about a mile off. Police cars were parked there. Something was going on. Spinning blue and red lights reflected off the girders and dark water. I felt like I could almost see it on her skin. Her eyes cleared and, for a second, I saw the diamonds in them just before a murky film shaded her irises.
She turned back to me. “Is Mercury retrograde?”
A hole in the clouds appeared right behind her and there were the stars bright as anything.
“Yes,” I said, and why not?
“Thought so. Feels like it.”
Devadatta stood. “I’ll be fine the rest of the way on my own. I’d give you a hug but you smell like wine and I might barf.”
It was 3 AM. The emergency lamps were behind us. Ahead was the next barricade. Devadatta started walking down the street singing something about blackout angels but I couldn’t tell what it was because she was facing the other way. I turned back to the kaleidoscope of police lights down by the bridge.
Once, I asked Raina if she thought she could sit still on fire.
“I mean if you were trained to do it,” I said, “like those monks.”
“Well, I think if I were really convinced that I was done with this lifetime I could. But I think we make our own reality and that’s just not the kind of reality I would make.”
Yeah, well, I thought, the kind of reality I would make doesn’t have people on fire in it either. Hey Raina! How do you say chardonnay in Sanskrit? I felt like a bullet in a gun. Like whatever was inside me was going to come out, like I had no control over it at all. I thought about the auto shop and the New Land Trust Building and all those people trying to figure out who bombed them. Not why, but who. Who exactly. As if by knowing, they would earn the right to forget about it. When I called the bomb threat into the sports bar near the Asian market, I did it because I wanted them to feel like I did, to cry over nothing and see bodies in the video aisles. It was only fair after their stupid silent wars, their reality shows and fake rock. They deserved some reflection on fear and the nature of impermanence. But it didn’t work. It didn’t work because they weren’t already scared. If I had done it after the New Land Trust they would have been. Timing.
Walking home it occurred to me that the great thing about a bomb threat is how much it leaves to the imagination. Like your mom saying you’re in trouble but not telling you why, you go over everything it could be in your mind. There were hidden rivers of guilt running underneath. There had to be.