June - The Liars 13 страница

"I thought there were no animals there?" Jasmine asked, "Or at least, none like a farm. There are animals, but they're not in cages or pens?"

Daniel nodded. "We had considered turning the place into a farm sanctuary at one point, especially when people kept giving us injured animals they were finding near their cottage. That's where the name came from, actually. We got a bear cub one time and were forced to send it away to an actual place that had medical supplies capable of treating it. We had been referring to the place before by its latitude and longitude, to try and be clever and make it sound like a secret spy place," Daniel paused to smile at Paul, who I could tell had been the genius behind the first name, "but after the wounded bear showed up, everyone else wanted that and started to call it the bear regardless. So we figured that was as much of a consensus vote that we needed."

"But why not wounded bear? You know, like the elders of the land? Like Crazy Horse or Sitting Bull. It would have a better ring to it," stated Nicole. I saw Daniel smile, just barely, and widen his eyes a bit. Nicole had said something wrong, this was clear even to me, but Daniel was good about it. He wanted to keep the people together, because although it was free for us to stay here, we had to work, and this was a business.

"We didn't want the bear's incapacity and wound to define it. We thought The Bear was just fine," Daniel said. "It leaves the interpretations more open. There are a lot of meanings in bear."

I nodded, thinking back to Alexa and the conversation we had had what felt like ages ago. I had her books with me, a lot of them to do with spirituality. I had no idea why I clung to these so hard. They were just stories. They were just figureheads that acted more as a metaphor for an abstracted concept (good, evil, servitude, pride) than anything else. The more Daniel and Paul (kind of) explained the way that the community was run, the more I began to realize that we would probably not have time for the books and the assignments Jasmine and I had brought at all. The fertilizer that he talked about before, the ones that they sold, that was going to be from us. Since we were living off the grid, this meant no toilets with running water. It was going to be better than an out-house, they assured me, but it was still very different than what we were all used to. Daniel described it the best way he could, but I still saw Nicole and Catherine's face twist up in horror. Apparently they had been searching for enlightenment, not exactly human waste. But the two were indistinguishable, at least according to Daniel. The two were equally important. You couldn't philosophize about life and then just forget that part of life meant shitting. Or dying, or fucking.

"You do realize that the place that we find so desirable on bodies are often either the site of waste, or in-between the sites of waste? Where we are born from is between shit and piss. You can't think about life without thinking about these things, too, and how they affect us," Daniel went on, not being as delicate with his wording as he had been in the past. He began to talk about how our entire society has probably changed its entire consciousness now because of indoor plumbing. "Think about it. The things that we find most disgusting about ourselves can immediately be vanished from our site. It's the same with garbage, too. We throw it away, we shit, and then we don't think about it anymore. We become horrified when we see human waste and landfills, when they are part of the human condition now. We can't be afraid of ourselves."

The guy in the front seat tried to find holes in Daniel's argument, asking why then they were living off the grid, away from the human condition, but Daniel managed to brush it away. I noticed that he didn't really give a real answer; perhaps he was hoping for Paul's explanation of the collapse from before to suffice. He went onto other integral matters.

"People are too hung up on the reason with a capital R. Truth with a capital T. Those are all well and good, but where does truth get you when you need to figure out how to get power into an operating silo?" Daniel asked rhetorically, then turned his attention towards the pair of us in the back. "That reminds me. Everyone new who is coming in is living in an old grain silo. Bed and furniture and whatever else you need is already there – except on one of them we had to replace the solar panels, so you won't get light for maybe a few days."

Paul said he was sorry, that he had dropped the ball on that one. Jasmine looked at me carefully, and I shrugged my shoulders. I knew she wouldn't mind, and I also knew that Catherine and Nicole would probably not be too keen on living without power. Daniel had turned to us first because he knew we could handle this. I was slightly flattered, and tried to make the blush go away from across my cheeks.

"What will we use instead?" I asked.

"Candles for now, and hey, thank you so much again guys for bearing this little burden. It's July now, though, almost independence day," he smiled anytime he mentioned state holidays, "so the sun should stay up longer. You'll probably not even notice the lack of power, once you get into working."

Working was going to be somewhat of an issue for Jasmine. Being seven months pregnant now, she was getting large and Lydia had given her orders to take it easy. She was still capable of doing many things, and she would fight to the death her right to do them, but she was going to get a different work load at the community. Daniel assured us that there were lots that she could do in the kitchen for cooking community meals; they tended to have lunch and breakfast on their own, but dinner was emphasized as a ritual together, since most people had come from the Food Not Bombs lifestyle and didn't want to break that idea of community feasting. There were also lots of jobs that she could help Paul with on the more business side of things. I had expected to see Jasmine's face twist with horror and outrage when they suggested putting her in the kitchen because she was pregnant, but she was okay. She seemed into it, actually. The entire community was vegan (there was one other vegetarian other than myself, and that was Paul; he went into town weekly to get his cheese and offered some to me if I wanted it) and this meant that all of their meals were vegan. This made Jasmine bubble over with excitement. When the people you were cooking for understood what you were doing, and they appreciated it, I guessed that it wasn't so bad to be slotted there.

Also, I began to notice that there were no gender segregations, which normally would have kept Jasmine back from inhabiting the kitchen. People did the jobs that they wanted to do, were capable of doing, or just had fun doing. Part of me had been worried that coming to a community like this, where there was so much time and energy put into just staying alive and generating power that they had no "actual" jobs, that there would be this huge wave of domesticity. I worried about it being a repeat of what we had been trying to escape before, just in a more rural setting. The ethos of, "same shit, different day" came to me a lot while we were packing and the abrasive language seemed to fit right in alongside Daniel's comment on human waste. I worried that Jasmine would really be barefoot and pregnant and I would be the working man while she was at home, cooking meals. I also considered how crazy we would get, being cut off from society and quarantined in the woods with nothing but our thoughts to occupy us. But the more time I spent in the car on the way over, and the more it was talked about, I began to feel more comfortable. They weren't quarantined, Daniel made sure to emphasize this point, especially when relating it to Jasmine and her pregnancy. Anyone could leave at anytime, for any reason, and it would be okay. Even the members who had been such a staple for so long often left and came back, like Paul. But they were a community, they had responsibilities, and they lived where they lived for a purpose, and that was it.

There were rules for the place. It wasn't just a free society, hippy-like where anything went, in spite of what Nichole and Catherine may have envisioned as they sat and read too much Beat Lit in their dorm rooms. That whole notion was a misconception, and another element where Paul had many ideas. He had been raised on a so-called hippy commune when he was young, and it was not like that at all. It was just like this one, although he had to give us credit that this place was far more organized. There were some standard members who always seemed to be there - Daniel, Paul, Tonya, and Kristen. They were the ones who had signed themselves off to this place and wanted to keep it up and running. They were the ones who lived there, but also went into town, and gathered people to help. There were about fifteen people living there for the month of July, including us. Sometimes the numbers dwindled below ten in the winter, but it was still possible to keep the place up and running. Paul had certainly signed himself away for life. He had been homeschooled on the commune up until high school, and then he got his degrees. He managed to do them in less time than it would have normally taken because his homeschooling had been so proficient ("who knew?" he said, and I could see Jasmine getting her own ideas for Paloma), and then tried to get a job in the "real world." Finding no real world awaiting him, and just endless streams of money that never really meant anything, he found city life alienating.

"But you were rich, or at least, could have been," the guy in the front seat mentioned, and Paul just shrugged.

"In a way, I suppose. But money isn't real. The US hasn't had money backed by anything, like silver or gold, in years. Decades now. Our money is an idea that way. We only believe it has power, and then it does. I understood that, but not everyone else did. Besides, I like the woods."

He turned his economic interest towards land after he met Daniel at a bank protest and through Michael Ruppert's newsletters. He lamented a bit about how there hadn't been any news from From The Wilderness in a while, and he wondered if Michael had done the same as he had years ago and just suddenly walked away from city life. Paul still visited the town, and he still dealt with people and worked very hard to put his degrees to use, but he could see that the money and materials he was dealing with now had a purpose. They weren't just ideas anymore. They had weight and were tangible. It had been too boring, he said, dealing with things he could not touch. While working the full time job he had for years, he said he never knew what it was like to be in his own body, and to integrate all the parts of himself. He used the word "fragmented" at one point and I began to pay attention.

"Do you still feel like that now?" I asked.

He shook his head. "I don't think we can ever be whole, but it's definitely something to aim for. I'm closer than I've been in a while."

I nodded, committing it to memory. Paul and Daniel decided that we all should probably have a pit stop after that, and pulled over to the side of the road. We were more than halfway there. Considering we had been on the road now for nearly four hours, Jasmine had a baby tap dancing on her bladder, and there were at least two people who had overloaded on caffeine in order to be up for the early departure, the stop was well overdue. There were not designated rest stops around us, and hadn't been for quite some time. When we all got out and into the open air, Nicole looked at Daniel to tell her where to go for only a few moments before she realized that we had gone far enough on the highway for the dirt to be our bathroom.

"It's all a part of life," he quipped to no one in particular, starting to undo his fly.

It was comical peeing at the side of the road. We all scattered off, all except for Paul, Daniel, and Ray (the guy in the front), who all peed next to one another about a foot from the van. Nicole and Catherine were scared of squatting and getting it on themselves and apparently shy. They didn't want anyone seeing them, so they told us they were venturing over the bushes, and down the side of the road to get some distance and illusion of privacy. I was fine peeing with the rest of the men, but Jasmine looked at me like "how on earth am I supposed to do this with that" and motioned to her stomach. We went the opposition direction of the two girls, mostly because we saw a tree and Jasmine wanted to use it for balance. I was her other support, and it actually wasn't too bad. Jasmine started to laugh as soon as she got the hang of it and then commented that she had wanted to pee standing up for years.

"How come you haven't?" I asked, feeling the wind break between us. The sun was high in the sky, and it was getting close to lunch. Jasmine shrugged, and said there was never really the opportunity to try.

When we all got back together, finally, after waiting what seemed to be a good twenty minutes for Catherine and Nicole, it was in front of the van. Daniel had wanted to gather everyone around so he could address us as eye to eye as he could, and so he could maintain concentration as he elaborated on the rules of the place.

"Number one is work. You have to be willing to put in a hard day's work in order to live here. It's why you're here and this whole place would not have been able to sustain itself for as long as it has without effort. I gave you all a brief summary of the jobs you can do here, and it's not going to be some tyrannical boss situation, but this is also not just a fun vacation. You don't get paid, but your food and lodging is covered. There are no contracts here, too. We mostly go by verbal agreements and handshakes with people in the community because we are not a corporation, distinctly. Because of this, though, you can easily pull something on us and a lot of people have. The basic principle is either you work, or you leave. That leads me to rule two: everyone has to agree. Or at least, there needs to be a majority who agree. We must take a vote and we all need to come together to do that. We need to reach decisions together. Tonya, Paul, Kristen, and I have the most responsibility and we know if something is advisable or not, but we are not authorities. We just know the land and how things work more. But we all make decisions together, and that does include kicking someone out if we have to. I know most of you aren't staying too long anyway, so it shouldn't be that big of a deal. Rule three, no alcohol. While we are lenient on the vegan policy and we ask that if you wish to deviate from that, you use separate utensils and get your own food your own way, alcohol and tobacco and other such substances are not as simple as Paul getting his cheese. We are not lenient on this. If we see alcohol, you are gone. We used to be less strict about this, but then we had too many problems." Daniel looked around, exchanging a glance with Paul, then back at us. "Any issues?"

No one moved. This was the first time he had really become authoritative, and he had needed to be out of the car to do that. Once everyone was up to date with what they were getting into and no one wanted to change their mind, we all got back in the car and began to drive off again. Daniel must have noticed the time, and figured a good way to get on a more friendly level again after the rules was to offer everyone food. He began to pass around sandwiches he had packed for lunch. Jasmine was about to speak up that she couldn't eat bread anymore, but he passed her a wrapped dish of rice and lentils instead and smiled.

"Don't worry, I remembered," he teased her. "We need to take special care of you."

I looked at Jasmine, wondering if she was going to get angry with him and take his comment negatively. Would she see this as him deriving her sole identity out of the fact that she was pregnant and nauseous, and was therefore "delicate"? She had been resistant to me for so long that I was unsure. But no, she smiled. Maybe she was just happy that she wouldn't get sick from eating gluten and that someone other than myself, Alexa and Mikey, or Vivian remembered. That was probably it. Daniel was slowly restoring her faith in humanity outside our small little niche. The community that I had witnessed before at Food Not Bombs at the periphery, and through Jasmine's point of view at the alternative birthing center, was now a place where we were both located; and very suddenly. Daniel was ushering us into the center and restoring her faith in the anarchist/punk/vegan scene that she had felt disenchanted with. Jasmine was used to people like Braden, full of nihilism and disrespect to people's choices who didn't match his own. So much of that lifestyle was thinking that your way was the only way, and that this was the only right answer. While I understood a lot of the ethics behind veganism and this whole live-off-the-land lifestyle, it made me resistant, probably because of that nihilistic undercut to a lot of the philosophies when carried to the extreme. I didn't want to believe that life was devoid of meaning and that our species should just die out and we should forget about everything because we're all fucked. That type of mentality made me want to get fucked up. It made me feel like the life that I had lived before I had gotten to this point meant nothing, when I knew, even then as I was desperately trying to leave it behind, that it still meant everything. When I had first heard Paul talk about the collapse of all the financial markets and his grim prediction for the future of America, I had been uncomfortable. I thought he was going to be just like Braden and tell us that we shouldn't have been reproducing and that we may as well all die off. But it was just the opposite: he knew this collapse was coming, and if something so horrible was so inevitable, then he needed to know how to protect himself and those he loved against it. He needed to learn how to survive it. It was what he was working on, now that he was inside of The Bear, and had a good base to stand on. He was not nihilistic, and though I still didn't quite comprehend his words or believe them to be absolutely true, I knew that we both wanted the same things. We just spoke about them differently.

The small exchange between Daniel and Jasmine and the knowledge that the place we were going did not contain any alcohol - or any potentially abusive substances - made me feel a lot safer going into this space. I had been questioning my motives silently in my head this entire time we were driving, trying to figure out why I was doing this. There was still that mental block because of the capital R reason and capital T truths behind the dogmatic preaching of the theory that I had been reading when I was with The Professor. I secretly wondered if going to The Bear and getting as far as I possibly could from civilization was so I could not feel like a liar. Was I only getting more into the cave or choosing another hiding place? Hearing them talk about tangible and material elements made me feel better because I was sure that those could not be illusions. I was sure that this was things as they were. But I worried that I was getting lost into an approach that only told me there was one right answer, when I knew that to be false. I had not let myself get too attached to the idea of coming to The Bear, just in case I was lead down that road again. That was probably why I had brought Alexa's books with me, and not Jasmine's or anyone else's. Alexa's books were about Tarot cards, astrology, alchemy, and the unconscious. I wanted to explore the areas that were deep within myself, the ones that I knew were right, even if I couldn't see them. As much as these politics were appealing, I still held my ground. I was still on that outside edge of Food Not Bombs mentally, looking in and watching, because that was the only place I knew of where I could call myself free and no one could discount me.

I couldn't get fucked up here, though. At first the thought panicked me. I was used to being able to drink whenever I wanted, even though I told myself I shouldn't. I knew I didn't want to continue down that pathway, but I had thought that part of my success being sober was the fact that there was alcohol around I could drink. We had none of it in the house, but I could have easily left. It was the accomplishment that I hadn't done that which had kept me going. But now it wouldn't be around and there would no backbone which I could define my accomplishments through. I wondered if I would still get that itch, the feeling that came on all of a sudden, the soucouyant or Shylock, that wanted that secret part of me filled until the brim. I pushed those thoughts out of my mind, and I looked back at Jasmine.

She was the reason that I had come to this. It was her Alaska; it was her last hurrah and final adventure. She had been reading about communities like this since her Masters' program. She had left the Women's Studies side of her degree fade into the backdrop around then. Although she was studying a feminist publishing house, her foundation had been structured by the English Department. She had begun to read about communities like this one during that time period, and she realized she had made a mistake. Not a big enough one to regret her degree as such, but one that still bothered, as if a piece was still missing. She had been like me when she was in her thesis, struggling to find herself within the realm of the academy, and trying to sort out what the right answer was. She had stuck with it, though, but had found solace in dreaming of these places. In dreaming of communities where actual discussions took place, even if it was discussions about who was going to deal with the human fertilizer today. That was a real discussion and it took place in the real world. And like Daniel said, was a real part of life. This had been all Jasmine had wanted. It seemed to be the last piece for her.

"I don't know if I will find it here," she told me candidly in the car. "But it couldn't hurt to look."

I had no idea that she had ever felt the same isolating experience, but I realized in the car that of course she had. It was so obvious, in every single one of us. There was a piece missing, there always was. It didn't matter if you were in love or not, and could try to put yourselves together, we had all been separated. Through that, we knew what pain was, too, and then we could see it everywhere. Everyone in that car was not whole.

Daniel, when we got closer to the community, went around to everyone in the van and asked what their motivation was for going to this place. I wanted to cut to the chase and shout my realization out to everyone there. But aside from Paul, who had already spoken explicitly about his fragmented self, I didn't think anyone else would want to hear that they were all broken people. I sat quietly, instead. Most of the answer given were short and based on a lot of false pretenses, at least, before he reached Jasmine. Ray had wanted to see if he could do it, and actually survive that way; it had been more of a personal challenge than anything steeped in politics. Catherine said that she liked "the idea of the place," but was not quite sure what that exactly the idea was when probed further by Daniel. Nicole said she always felt like she was born in the wrong time period and was following her gut to get here. When Daniel finally got to Jasmine, she blushed and had no idea where to begin. None of the stories before hers even compared to her epic saga of delving into the theory, politics, and ethics that she could finally agree with and adapted in order to fight off the ones she didn't. How could she express her nights alone in alternative resource rooms trying to find herself between lines of books? How could she express that she had piles and piles of zines at home, and zines than were given to her by her sex-shop affiliated former lover who was also pregnant or and used to be a riot grrrl? Could she render that moment where Kathleen Hanna had changed her life? How could she express that while she once quoted Lorca, she now quoted Lorde and in order to get away from the unsafe master's house, she needed to drive all the way here and just do it now? How could she even express in a few sentences that she was carrying a child that was built within a three-way relationship, and she needed to tell her baby all that she accomplished before she was born, that she had lived up to her ethics and her own ideologies, if only for a month? There was no time for a hundred years of feminist history, all three waves, especially when Jasmine's own wave was slowly getting higher and more powerful with each mile we clipped away.

I looked at Jasmine and watched how pained her expression became for this. I touched her back, and encouraged her to go on, and wondered how she could condense her experiences into a word. It was impossible. She had a whole fortress and saga behind her. How do you bear the weight of your own legacy in a few sentences? But she tried. She gave a condensed version of her academia struggle, her struggle in the work force while being pregnant, and expressed the need for a break. "I also wanted more practice and less theory. Not the other way around," she added, and that seemed to drive the point home. She had talked the longest out of anyone, and then, being highly aware the silence that followed, mumbled an apology.

"No, do not apologize. That should be another rule. Let's take a vote to make another rule for The Bear community be that we don't apologize for speaking our minds. All in favour say I," Daniel cut in. We all raised our hands and Daniel nodded, finalizing it. "Of course, we'll run it through the rest of the people at dinner tonight, but I'm sure it will pass. Thank you, Jasmine. That was rather insightful."

I could tell Daniel was impressed. He was sitting in between the pair of us in the back, not wearing a seatbelt, cross legged, his back up against Nicole's seat. He had spent some time talking to Jasmine on the phone before we prepared to come here, but I could tell he wanted to talk to her a lot more. I felt a pang of jealousy go through me. I already knew that for the most part, Jasmine and I would be separated in our work loads, but I didn't want us to be spending whatever free time we had apart too. We had come to do this together, and I was there for her.

Suddenly, Daniel turned his attention towards me. His dark eyes engrossed me, and that pang of jealousy dissipated and turned into something else entirely. It changed inside of me into something else that I had not felt in a long time, something that I could not name. He started, "So, Frank. Why have you decided to come to The Bear? If you say for darling Jasmine here, then I think I will need to inform you that she is a big girl now. A woman! And we always take care of our own."

I knew he was teasing me, and Jasmine laughed, but it made me uncomfortable. Although I had told myself it was for Jasmine, when I was forced to peel away that layer of myself, my hiding spot became clear. I thought a bit, but eventually replied. "I came here to forget."

Daniel must have already known what I was forgetting; Jasmine must have told him on the phone, because my response did not rattle him. He blinked slowly, and thanked me for sharing, but he didn't ask anything, and no one else did. Any explanation would have defeated the purpose of going.

Within another thirty minutes, we had arrived. The community's sign hung off a tree branch near the gate where the main house was. It read THE BEAR in large block letters, with a paw print painted in black, and a faded quotation inscribed underneath. Jasmine began to get excited as she placed the quotation within her realm of knowledge, then she and Daniel began to talk about the book it was from; surprisingly, a fiction one. It had been his choice to do the sign after the incident with the bear, nearly seven years ago now, and he had been reading the book at the time. It seemed that Jasmine's two interests were merging within this place six hours from where we left and she was beaming with excitement. While she and Daniel talked Faulkner, I looked at what would be my home for the immediate future.

The house we saw as we began to go up the narrow driveway was rustic looking; it was small, only one floor, and plants were blooming untamed all around it. Its shape and aesthetic was familiar in an antiquated historical way, only it was completely contrasted by the huge solar panels that were on its roof. It was part classic, and part futuristic. This was where Paul and Tonya lived and where most of the business ventures went on. There was a large garage right next to it, definitely added at a later date, and mostly used to store the one van and the rest of the vats of vegetable oil that the car ran on. As we drove under its roof, I expected the vats to be putrid, but it was pleasant.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14