20 The Head of John the Baptist
I have two recurring nightmares. In one, I am out of control on a river filled with Nikes, bulk tampons in twenty-pound bags and Indonesian patio furniture. In the other, I see the Statue herself gather her gowns and step off the island. Liberté! Liberté! Hairpins falling like cluster bombs in the harbor and a bustle of chattering soundbites—she wades in. And I think I could take having these dreams if I knew when they would stop. If someone said, you will have the first one two hundred and thirty nine more times and the second one six times, I could be okay and get used to it because I would know that it wasn’t forever. The problem is that I will never know, not until the day I die and look back and say, oh! that was it. February 22, 20— that’s when they stopped. Likewise, I don’t know when all this will stop. It’s a strange thing to be god of someone else’s terror, even minor god, because I knew I was harmless. People were figuring that out but there was a shining moment in between, a strawberry on the cliff, passing, it still shimmered.
The phone rang. It was Tamara. She wanted to meet for brunch at Naught. I liked the idea of eating somewhere I had recently threatened to bomb. Besides, I heard they had an ice sculpture there of Leda and the Swan, but that was probably just wishful thinking. Tamara said she had a friend in the kitchen that could hook us up—cashew hummus, seed crackers and probiotic gin—whatever we wanted. I walked into the restaurant right before the rain started. The group of men that came in behind me turned when they heard the thunderclap. “Just in time,” said one of them as the door shut. No, you’re not, I thought. Someone turned up the bossa nova.
Tamara was in the far corner with her face in a book. I walked over and sat down. Her hair was in short pigtails and she was wearing a green t-shirt with owls on it, light freckles over the bridge of her nose and her fair skin almost violet under her eyes.
“So, do they really make probiotic gin?” I asked.
“Yes. I always get it. It’s disgusting.”
She handed me a glass. It tasted like the bottom of a planter.
“Guess what I saw on the way down here?” I said. “‘Superland. We will never forget!’ sprayed right the a wall by the bus station.”
Tamara picked up her menu, “Do you like nori?”
“Do I what?”
“Like nori. I like dulse.”
“Did you hear what I said?”
“About what?”
“Superland. We will never forget?”
“That’s the problem they already have,” she flipped the menu over. “Do you know what makes something a sea lettuce?”
“Come on, it was cool. Citizens for a Rabid Economy? What was the other one, Manifestation?”
“All I’m saying is that it’s a f*cking lovely day to buy more IKEA. They’re already out shopping.”
“Two days ago you said it was brilliant.”
“Yes,” she shrugged, “but it was a wink, wasn’t it? It didn’t really change anything.”
“Oh right, it would have been much more effective if they lit a trashcan on fire and spray-painted anarchy on the wall.”
The waiter set a small glass dish of sprouted lentils on the table.
“Not saying that.”
“So it doesn’t count because no one torched the parking lot?”
“No one did anything. It was more like a joke, right? Just like all the other threats. And,” she leaned across the table, “you’re right, a lot of people claiming to be anarchists are pathetic suburban kids that just don’t want to clean their rooms, but I’ll give them one thing, they’ve got it right about property destruction. It isn’t violence, war, poverty, now that’s violence. Blowing up someone’s SUV when no one’s around it is just a good idea. Either way, don’t lump me in with them.”
Tamara’s face was inches from mine. I could see gray lines in the blue of her iris, her cornflower fingertips on the gin glass. She was a bully but we were more alike than different. I might be too chicken to set an SUV on fire but I wasn’t really against it. In fact I loved reading about things like that because I knew the people who did it were on the same side I was. Even if they didn’t know about me, I knew about them and that made all the difference. I began to think that maybe what I viewed as sensitivity and compassion had just been squeamishness all along.
Tamara settled back and called the waiter over.
“I’m going to have the sea lettuce,” she turned, “and you?”
“Nothing.”
“My friend will have nothing.”
Tamara handed him the menus. She sipped her green gin and read the local produce roster on the chalkboard by the bar.
“Squash, garlic, cilantro. Good, I like cilantro, kale, also very good.”
“If you’re such a revolutionary what’s your suggestion?”
“Chard, apple... Don’t know what I’d do. Have to think about it. Pretty sure it doesn’t have anything to do with committees and talking points. Fingerling potatoes. Aren’t they poisonous raw? You’re a scientist, Della, you should know.”
“Oh, you must be part of the underground no one’s ever heard about.”
“I don’t belong to any group outside of my friends.”
“That’s a real bridge builder.”
But it was a pretty hollow response. I wasn’t part of any group either, and not just because my wiring was shot and I cried all the time, but because I had never met anyone in any political organization that I liked. “Eat with your hands like the African people,” that’s what this one girl I knew used to say. Someone told me she referred to a fork as fascist. And they were all like that, macrobiotic Belgian trust-fund junkies, park bench anarchists, mean white lesbians in canvas clothing and dreadlocks—each ready to denounce you as a cop at the slightest sign of dissent. My dirty little secret was that I only liked militants at a distance. Up close I couldn’t stand them. Their targets were always the same, a cow path from the cell to the Great Reactionary Dawn. I wanted something more creative than dead clerks.
“So Della, on a similar note, what do you think will come from the demonstrations around the shootings? An editorial? An oversight committee? Constructive public outrage? ’Cause I’m betting on nothing.”
She took a bite of the seaweed the waiter brought.
“This is the grossest thing I’ve ever had. Try some.”
She pushed it toward me. I pushed it back.
F*cking Delphi of Gnostic Anarchism. Gatekeeper. Hey, I have to go now. I’m late for a hanging. Gonna celebrate the eight-hour day with some friends, you should totally come. F*cking elitist. Assuming I hadn’t thought about these kinds of things. But inside me something quivered. It was a road I had never gone down. My family has no patience for anarchists. Grace sent me to a Marxist reading group when I was sixteen so that I wouldn’t be tempted to become one. Credence didn’t have to go, the little loyalist. I remember when I showed up, this really sweet, old communist thought I was part of a youth brigade that didn’t exist. He’d talk for hours about revolutionary strategy. His analysis was flawless but it was like being forced to watch a starving polar bear clamber over breaking ice after a fat and agile sea lion. Nice left! Shame about all that saltwater. Ever thought about hunting in packs?
I was the polar bear. I got up.
“I told Mirror I’d help her move stuff for the party.”
“Good. Me too. We can go together.”
“Do what you want.”
Outside, the rain had stopped for the moment. The sky was dark gray but there were bands of pale light on the horizon. Driven against the ground, they brightened under the compression and made everything slightly blue. A bald man’s head went by, vivid as a robin’s egg.
“We can walk from here,” Tamara said.
It was raining heavily again by the time we got to the Cycle. We crossed a muddy inner courtyard. Wet chickens walked in jerky patterns through rows of vegetables and rainwater barrels. Mirror had everything stored in an uninhabited part of the squat and we walked into a common area that was once a lobby. Posters of bands and demonstrations, black silhouettes of raised fists and barbed wire, devil horns and drag races covered the walls. In the center of the room around a table two men and a woman sat rolling cigarettes and drinking coffee. One man introduced himself as Black Francis. The other, with ashen blond hair and pale skin, was Jules, and next to him was Britta, who had short henna-red hair, gray eyes, and a wide flat milky face. I knew a hundred people who looked like her.
“Come on!” yelled Mirror from the corridor ahead. “We only have the van for a few hours.”
We loaded the van with props, tools and decorations at the Cycle then hopped in and drove to Mirror’s place to get some boxes she had there. The whole way there Tamara couldn’t stop going off about the bomb threats and how pathetic they were. We were coming down the stairs of Mirror’s apartment when I finally yelled, “What the hell do you care about Manifestation anyway?”
“Nothing! I don’t care about it at all. It was a hoax. There’s nothing to care about.”
I wanted to push her down the stairs but my arms were full of boxes. I’m a foot taller. If I hit her it would hurt. I thought about that going down the stairs.
“And how do you know it’s a hoax?” I said. “Half the town is still blocked off.”
“Because they haven’t found a single bomb. They don’t even think it’s related to the parking garage or dog track.”
“They don’t know. It could be related.”
“Well, do you believe it is?” She stepped in front of me to push open the front door. “Or do you think it’s a hoax?”
The rain was so loud I could barely hear. I tried to go through but Tamara was holding the door and blocking it all at the same time.
“Well,” I said jamming her against the doorframe as I passed, “I don’t think it was a joke. I would have been scared if I was there. If someone called and said they were going to blow the place up. I would have been terrified.”
Tamara grinned flashing her broken incisor and moved aside.
Mirror backed the van over the curb and honked. We ran the boxes in off the porch. It was a f*cking downpour. I could see Mirror in the front of the cab talking to someone on the phone and eating a cupcake.
“In fact,” I said throwing some boxes into the back, “I like what they’re doing,” I slammed the van door, “someone should be drawing those lines,” I was shouting, “pointing that stuff out. People should have to think about their world and if no one gets killed, even better.”
“Right,” Tamara yelled, “think. Think about it. Not do anything about it. If you like that stupid group so much why don’t you go join up. It couldn’t be that hard. I’m sure they have a blog.”
“Oh yeah it would have been much better if they actually blew up the dog track.”
“So you don’t believe they did it either,” she laughed.
“I don’t care who blew up the dog track! It wasn’t exactly a call for class war, now was it? I mean who even goes to the dog track? Poor, stupid, white people. They need to be organized, not traumatized over the death of their favorite dumb f*cking anorexic greyhound.”
I stomped back up the stairs and was about to make another point, a really good one about vanguards as a sub-cultural delusion, when Mirror came in behind us, freaking out because the eyehooks at the warehouse weren’t going to hold and she wanted slings and a trapeze.
“Hang plants,” I said.
“It’s supposed to be sexy,” she screamed, “not some hippy soft porn garden scene. Nobody wants to look up and see ferns.”
“And what you’ve got can’t hold a person?”
“Not with the kind of torque we’re going to be putting on it.”
“Post a weight limit,” I said.
“The f*cking fat chicks would slay me. Slain. I would be dead. No more parties. Ever. I would actually have to slit my own throat to have an afterlife.”
She kicked a box of glassware.
“This rain sucks and I’m totally going to get a yeast infection if I keep eating this much sugar.”
She threw the half-eaten cupcake in the trash.
The phone rang and she asked me to get it. It was Devadatta.
“Turn on the TV.”
“I don’t think there is a TV.”
Mirror made devil’s horns with her fingers to signify television.
“No. No TV.”
“Well, they blew up that temp agency. You know the one out by the malls, Brass Ring? They blew it up.”
“That was a hoax,” I said.
“I’m watching it now. The blast took out the whole front.”
Once, I fell into a frozen river. It was like that. I held the phone away from my ear. Tamara saw my face and came around behind me so she could hear too.
“Were there others?”
My voice was so quiet I’m surprised she could understand what I said.
“Yeah, they found another bomb in the Olde Towne Mall. You know where all the high school kids hang out? But they got that one before it went off.”
Tamara turned on the radio. There were two more, one by the loading dock of Transcontinental and the other in a small pho place that served over 100 kinds of bubble tea. I thought I heard one go off somewhere nearby but it was someone closing a door. Car engines sound like low-flying planes and the woman clapping for her dog to come like hand grenades. I was an atom. My electron cloud awareness charged everything around me. I could feel a part of myself, way, way beyond the universe. I had done something terrible.
“I guess I was wrong about that group,” said Tamara quietly. “Maybe they are about something after all.”
I didn’t say anything. I was running over the list trying to figure out how many places I’d called.
We went to a bar with a TV and stared for an hour. Devadatta met us there. Bomb squads and cameras were trained on the New Land Trust building like it was a birthday cake with a stripper inside. Then they cut back to Brass Ring with its missing face.
“Man,” Mirror said, “just look at that.”
I couldn’t stop. I saw the buildings burn in live time. People were crying. They were scared. High school girls huddled together waiting for their parents to come get them. A little Vietnamese boy wailed in his mother’s arms. Oh god, I thought, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god…and I ran my shaking hands through my hair. With short sharp fingernails I scratched at my chest until it was red with crosshatches. What had I done?
Newscaster Ken’s Black Friend Garth was interviewing crickets.
“Chirp, chirp, rutuhtuhtuhtuhvrrrrrr… MANIFESTTION. Chirp, chirp, rrrhhhhtuhtuhvrrrrrr…”
Mirror got up. “Everything is going to be f*cking closed for days.”
“Are you going to reschedule the party?” Devadatta asked.
“F*ck no! Letting the terrorists win and all.”
Devadatta pulled out a scrap of paper with a phone number on it and handed it to Mirror. “Oh! I forgot. I talked to Raina and she’s definitely coming. She’s even talking about leading a class there, you know, like an intermission. That way everyone can stay grounded. She said to call her. Most people never get to practice yoga naked. I really think it will help keep people in their bodies more.”
“Whatever,” Mirror said, “just don’t make it too granola. Focus on stretching the perineum. Mula Bandha, that’s something people could use for sure. Remind me tonight and I’ll get mats.”
They left. I barely noticed. My eyes were on the Miracle Station. Every so often the feed went back to the news desk and anchors gave updates on some border skirmishes they were following. But I couldn’t tell which border, or whose. Then they went back to the bombs and the fires here, where it was all burning and no one had been hurt, not yet. New ejecta glittered in the terrorsphere.
“Come on,” Tamara said, “I’ll walk you home.”
She dragged me off the stool but I blocked traffic in the doorway because I couldn’t stop watching and she had to pull me out.
“Everyone’s fine, Della. Take a breath.”
The people on the street said it was a miracle. Not one person hurt. Tamara thought it was a miracle too. I started thinking about it. It couldn’t be an accident. Whoever did it must have been really careful. They must have meant for those other bombs to be found. It was my own flag waving back across the gulch. After walking a while, I saw the natural balance of cause and effect in play, karma created long before me. With every block, I grew confident. I hadn’t bombed those places. They deserved it but I hadn’t done it. I was sick of feeling responsible for other people’s decisions. Paying for other people’s wars. My muscles began to relax. And, instead of horror something else filtered through, the faint thrill of becoming. It was a miracle. The Saint with Black Tears passed me and waved, her children safe at home. Up the street I heard the jackhammers. They’re building a supermarket made of mud. It’s going to have valet parking, be completely organic and only fish that was inhabited by the souls of former rapists will be sold. Workers will get emergency room coupons and free coffee. I looked at the sky. Everything has a beginning, middle and end. The rain had stopped. Then it started again. It wasn’t personal.
We got to my door. Nobody was home. Tamara said she wanted to see the head of John the Baptist and when I showed it to her she laughed so hard I thought she was going to choke.
“The cheeks are made of sought after recommendations.”
My pride. Taking credit coming and going. Tamara was on her back, tears rolling down her face leaving little webs of eye makeup under her eyes. “What are we going to do with it?” she asked when she got breath.
“I was going to give it to my brother for his birthday zipped in a body bag with ‘For the Fairest’ written in Greek across the front and a My Pretty Pony inside.”
She didn’t know what I was talking about. I didn’t know what I was talking about. It didn’t matter. She sat up, flushed, looking about thirteen years old.
“Let’s take it somewhere and let some kids bash the hell out of it!”
We put the head in a pillowcase and caught a bus to the Ukrainian neighborhood out near the suburb of Pretty Little Hopes. The rain had let up a little but the sky was still dark. On the way we got bags of candy, a cheap baseball bat and some twine. Everywhere around us people were glued to their televisions or on the phone. Sirens sounded intermittently. A couple of times I wanted to turn back but she wouldn’t let me.
We found a tree near a middle school and strung it up. Kids started gathering even before we were done. I let a tall fat boy with an Ozzy patch on his jacket have the first go. We blindfolded him with his friend’s bandana and spun him around. His first swing missed but his second cracked the cheek of John the Baptist. Next up was a girl with stringy hair and new breasts. She crushed the Prophet’s chin. After her came two boys, one after another, each small and fast but neither of them left a mark on the head.
A sheet of sunlight came through the rainclouds and fell on the children, lighting up half a face, or the top of an ear. It made the gold crosses on their pale necks flash. Then it shifted and broke, streaming through the cracks in the dark gray sky, and played off the tips of reaching fingers. It turned the baseball bat white as it cut through the air.
A girl stepped into the pit and all the kids started yelling in Russian, trying to get her to swing one way or the other but she just stood there while the head of John the Baptist swayed above her. I swear to god she was listening to it move. She bent her knees slightly, wrapped her fingers around the bat and swung. The bat came down across his left eyebrow and split the head diagonally. Candy rained down around her and the kids started squealing.
“My kind of religion,” said Tamara.
The tall fat boy with the Ozzy patch jumped at the battered Prophet and got hold of an ear. He yanked and tore off the back of the head. A few more pieces of candy fell out and he dove for them leaving the papier-mâché skull shapeless on the ground. I walked over and picked up the piece. I recognized the handwriting on the inside of the brain case. It was a personal note from a council officer at the Paleontological Society asking me to attend an event. I threw it down and kicked it. I never felt so free in all my life.
Tamara and I began to walk. I folded the pillowcase up and stuck it in my bag. A large droplet of water splashed down on my scalp. Then another.
“Here it comes again,” she said but we didn’t walk any faster.
“That’s something I’d remember,” I wiped water out of my eyes, “if I was a kid. It would stay with me until the day I died. Do you think they knew whose head it was?”
“No. I don’t think they cared.”
“Would it have been better if I told them, do you think?”
“Probably not. By the way, I really liked the thumbtack eyes.”
“Thanks, I enjoyed pushing them in.”
“And the junk mail hair.”
“That was fun too.”
“Was your diploma in there?”
“No. I cut it up and gave it to a toddler who wanted to color.”
When we got on the bus we were drenched. Tamara buried her chin in her coat, “You should come out to the farm. Stay with us for a while. It’d be good for you to get a break from the city.”
“Yeah, I heard you got goats.”
She laughed, “That too. But more importantly people, we have people who think like you do. There’s a bunch of us out there. You should really come.”
She got off at the next stop and I watched her shrink as the bus rumbled down Colony of the Elect Boulevard. All the way home I hummed a song Grace taught me about soldiers and sailors and the shining North Star.