17 Manifestation
It was just after 2 AM when I got in and I turned on the kitchen light. I was restless. On the counter was a letter from the Department of Geology at UC Davis propped up against a Rice Krispies box. I didn’t need to open it to see what was inside. It was a copy of my article, soon to appear the Journal of Paleobiology. I flipped it over. My work. Years of academic torque folded in three and stuffed into an envelope. As pointless as anything under the sun. What to make of it? Origami swans? A fleet of paper airplanes?
Upstairs, the mail tub I’d named “the head of John the Baptist” overflowed, my own personal Lagerstätte, my quiet lake, silt-bottomed and still, to catch all the falling things and press them like wildflowers into the earth. I put down the letter. I didn’t want to talk about geology with anyone ever again. I dumped the mail on the bed.
I hadn’t done papier-mâché since sixth grade but that night I made wheat paste and tore my mail to shreds. All the scraps of my education went in, all for the greater glory of the head of John the Baptist. I formed the skull out of academic accolades and the ears from peer review. The hair was shredded junk mail. I couldn’t bring myself to destroy the Paleobiology article but everything else got used. Paste and bits of paper stuck to my hands like barnacles. I want the head of John the Baptist to be as big as the head of a Minotaur, I thought. That’s the problem with symbolic gestures. People never take them far enough. They don’t see them as a system. They blow up something right in front of them, like the bathroom of the New Land Trust building, and then caper around like monkeys. They might as well throw bananas at it. When I was little Grace used to say we were a ship with a broken mast. She said we needed to be careful or we’d sink. And now I think she was right. But there’s something new, I know because I stay up and listen to the world at night. We are on a ship, only we’re not sinking. We’re moving again, cutting fast through the sea with a crucifix mast, plastic bag sails and a hull made of disposable razors and straw.
I spread my field notes on the floor of my room. All the sketches and lists, the formations and fossils and indexing of trends, I laid them out.
It already was one big map.
I knelt by a series of Vietnamese nail salons and white suburban fitness centers. They were marked as a braided stream. At the mouth of the waterway was an enormous Asian market called Transcontinental. It never closes and inside huge HDL screens play karaoke videos with Filipinos running around Scottish castles. I marked it with a large red “U.”
I put another “U” by the box-mall-church and looked at the map again. Transcontinental, The New Land Trust Building, the box-mall-church—they were all unconformities, non sequiturs. I put a “U” by a cluster mall that ran a free bus service back and forth to the high schools. I put a “U” by Redbird Square for appropriating a public space as a billboard for a bank. I put a “U” by the central library, which was half empty of books and had black birds in the rafters. Such hollow hopes should be punished, shown for what they were. Biodiesel fueling station with an armored vehicle bay? Large red “U.”
I grabbed a copy of Vermeij’s Nature: An Economic History off the shelf, unfolded the cover and tossed the book aside. Spreading the dust jacket on the coffee table I wrote “Della’s Flag” across the top in red marker. At the bottom of my flag I drew a little Rat Queen Betsy Ross. The head of John the Baptist was drying on the coffee table and the nine rat cell phones lay on the bed unopened. It was now morning in the imaginary territory of New Honduras and I heard Annette and Credence come in downstairs. Opening my door, I leaned over the banister. She went into the bedroom and he went into the shower. I waited until I heard the water run then stuffed the maps and phones in my bag and left.
Outside, the dry bushes rattled and everything was tense like something hanging heavy was about to drop. The pressure was falling and the sky was the color of cement. I was halfway down Heritage Avenue before I realized that the windows of the neighborhood were black. Some were covered with cloth, some with construction paper. Some had coats strung across the panes on twine. It took me a second to realize that it was for the boys. Grace crossed my mind with her endless wake and I thought about texting Jimmy an apology but what was I to apologize for? Grace in general? The Great Onslaught itself? I tried to warn her. She signed up. Over the next few hours, funeral services would be arranged. Community groups would meet. Credence would try to get the unions to join the demonstrations. But whatever they came up with—an army of shiny jackets marching in phalanx and covered with buttons, a black rainbow invoking the mountaintop—it wasn’t going to work. It never does. It was just adding color to the sand painting. Oh look! I really like that streak of brown, so bold where you put it next to all that red. In early springtime a man was hanged off the Roseway Bridge. Someone saw the body on the way to work dangling like a blackened branch over the river. They had meetings then too.
I took the bus out to Four Points of Heaven mall and got off a stop early. In the parking lot of the Village of Light Towne Square I activated the nine baby rat cell phones. I was calling in bomb threats by noon. First, with the tangerine cell that belonged to Venus Rodere. She got the cluster mall and the biodiesel fueling station (with clever armored vehicle bay) and the Asian behemoth, Transcontinental—all of which deserved to be blasted to atoms, the terrible little minerals. I ditched the tangerine phone in some lush industrial landscaping and went on to the next.
On the lime cell phone I called Better Gods and Gardens, the New Land Trust building (as a reminder) and the yoga studio:
Yoga on the Hill, Devadatta speaking.
Get everyone out of the building—
Hold please—
Typing. Online trying to befriend the entire country of
Nepal.
—Sorry about that, how can I help you?
This is a bomb threat.
I think you have the wrong number.
I don’t.
Well, I can’t think of anyone who would want to blow us up.
I can.
Okay, well, I’ll let people know but there’s class going on right now and I think they’re all in Shavasana.
Perfect.
Then I called Naught, a raw food tapas bar, because the bathroom sink counter had the name of a different god/prophet painted on every fourth tile and “ALL IS ONE” inlaid around the basin. Then I called all the strip joints that charged a stage fee. Then after that, the human resources department of a popular Vietnamese restaurant chain, demanding an end to bubble tea as the hyper modern equivalent to absinthe and a barrier to real revolution because the equation Bubble Tea = Something to Look Forward To depressurizes the misery of capitalism and is a Hello Kitty band-aid on the festering wound of Neo-Liberalism.
I threw that phone in the trash and boarded the Number 22 to Pretty Little Hopes.
Eartha Rodere
When the heart opens, the hands follow:
191292309.24
Up ahead was Brass Ring Employment Solution, a temp agency shaped like a refrigerator and built out of concrete and torque. Their motto was “Every little bit helps.” Flocks of men in white shirts, crisp sleeves rolled down over their tattoos, kissed ass daily just to work for nothing. Hostages taking each other hostage. Jazz hands. Out of respect for the relationship between war and commerce and the necessity of cheap labor for both to thrive, I let Aries Rodere make the call.
Good Afternoon! Brass Ring, where we know that every little bit helps…(maintain wage slavery).
How may I direct your call?
Bombs, I told them, blast coronas the size of Texas. Bone fragments like chalk dust staining the sidewalk and washing away in the rain.
I heard building alarms. The bus driver closed the doors. I got off at the next stop, leaving the raspberry cell phone under my seat pinging towers all the way to Pretty Little Hopes.
I was only halfway through my list. There were so many facets. Redbird Square for being named after a bank and recasting cultural geography as a proprietary object. The central library for being a defunded sham, a gutted shell, a hope crime. The Cine-Tower for having 20 theaters, 10 levels of parking and playing Christmas music year round. The golden oldies station KGOD for being a mask of Christianity formed from revisionist musical portraits of the past. And for sending nostalgia into the valleys of the scurrying poor to get them through the work day then giving them a god to go to at night when they’re tired. Me, third. 8, 8 and 8. The FM repeaters chattering like cats, selling bobbleheads, pushing mad cow meat and formula on babies so their mothers don’t have to keep up enough body weight to nurse. The Happy Day Corporate Charity Center? O let me count the ways… IKEA monkeys, urban yogis with real estate kriyas, manifest class destiny—each target was a jewel on the web, a dewy gem reflecting the Grand Ravage back to itself.
When it got dark I stopped to organize my notes and get food. It was raining by then and I was in line at a falafel stand with a newspaper folded over my head. A small radio was playing Egyptian disco. Suddenly it stopped and the emergency broadcast signal came on. The falafel man turned up the volume. Crackling, competing with the slap of raindrops on the tiny tarp, the words “explosion,” “dog track” and “panic” emerged. The woman next to me turned gray. The falafel man started packing up and dumping fry oil trays into the gutter. A bomb had gone off at the dog track and another at a parking garage downtown.
But I saw satellites in the terrorsphere and put my list away. No one had claimed the New Land Trust bombing. Superland™ was still generating bumper text even though nothing had happened. Is it safe to shop? And now with the new threats? If there was one thing I learned from Credence, it was how to redirect messages—the New Land Trust building, the dog track, the parking garage—their violence, reframed with a new message. Talking points for the Blackberry Massacre.
I was close to the cemetery on the border of New Honduras and that’s where I went, deep into the acres and tall trees, past the new gravestones in Chinese, Cyrillic and Tagalog, and into the oldest part where it’s nothing but flu babies and second sons by the statue of a mermaid. Under her bronze arms, I called in and claimed the real bombs as mine.
“Cultural obsolescence impeding the flow of fresh commerce,” I told the police operator, “that’s why we blew up the dog track.”
I gave different reasons for the other bombs because Citizens for a Rabid Economy only described part of the ugliness. I needed a name for the unseen hand behind it all and I found it. When I dropped the lemon cell phone among the leaves at the base of the bronze mermaid the name of my new movement was spelled out on the LCD screen: MANIFESTATION. It glowed phosphorescent on the face of the phone, a little pool of light. Then went black on the forest floor.