The Lynching

From “A Practical Guide to Anarchism”…

Since our hero never knows when or why the state is going to crack down on him, one must have certain munitions prepared in advance. It is necessary in any profession to have a canard, a decoy waiting in the wings when called for. For example if you prepare taxes, everyone thinks the number of outstanding returns you have is the number of clients waiting to file. It wouldn’t occur to them you have a return with a blank name, pre-approved by the IRS, dated to before the tax laws changed which you keep for emergencies. Essentially you are prepared to head off a potential threat not yet knowing what it is, and therefore can’t be accused of conspiracy. When an antagonist comes after you for whatever reason, you will have made certain measures having never premeditated the subject of tax evasion. The roadblocks delaying their efforts have to fall into place by coincidence (such as the system being down for repairs), and they will not comprehend how you are able to stay ahead of them…

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There was some kind of green crud growing on the social worker’s glasses, and his dingy suit seemed to have no shoulders with his unshaven face just sitting on his round body as if he was really shaped like that. His office was so decrepit Davon and I would joke that the building had flooded when the lake rose while he was sitting there.

“So the idea for the camping trip came from Davon’s interest in survivalism.” I began as he peered at me. “There’s this peninsula that juts out like a finger which once belonged to a sheriff; the concrete pediments of a boat house are still there on the ground with some rusted boating equipment. So it’s a place where you can just go if you can find it, that’s what caught our interest.”

“I didn’t see the name Davon among your coworkers.” he stated coldly. “What is his last name?”

I thought for a moment. “Haben.” I answered him. “Davon Haben.”

“And how did you meet?”

“I’m not sure when he first joined the floor team.” I thought carefully. “You know I was team leader once, but I no longer have those responsibilities. He’s a real smart-mouth, always talking about anarchy and end-of-the-world scenarios. He gave me this book…”

“Which makes you and your friend the last people to see the dead man alive.” he said warily. “I understand he was the person who took your old job, and yet the three of you planned this trip together?”

“Actually I didn’t know he was coming, he just showed up. But yes, it was an accident. He does hand-fishing where you sit all night with the line wrapped around your fingers. I can imagine what would happen if you caught a monster, but the next morning he was just gone. I had fallen asleep in our vehicle, when I woke up Davon had driven us to a friend’s house and he wasn’t among them.”

“Yes the body was found in poor condition after the rains subsided.” he said. “So you were not living there out of your vehicle after you lost your job? Someone saw you catching fish in buckets and digging an inlet to keep them alive.”

“No it was survivalism techniques, just survivalism.” I answered.

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I honestly don’t recall when Davon and I first met. I don’t remember him being there when I was supervisor; now someone sits next to me in the break room and just starts talking. It’s strange how you have dignity and self-respect one day and the next you’re a captive audience. When it was time for me to recertify I was surprised to receive a two-week notice of termination. The departments were being shuffled around and I was invited to apply for a higher position, an application that was sent right back to me. But I suspect it had something to do with that girl cashier I tried to help last year, I just didn’t figure they were working together to get rid of me and make a space for that punk Mallansohn.

I endured a series of devastations as the money ran dry. Before this I went to concerts or just went straight home from work instead of spending most of my time listening and making plans for cheap outdoor recreation. Davon and I had some common masculine interests, we talked about spending the night in a cave and boiling crawfish in a 2-liter plastic bottle as if it was something to aspire to. (It was like being in fraternity again.) The second was politics, or should I say we shared an anti-politic. And the third thing was a mutual dislike of our superior who didn’t know his ass from a donkey. That girl had aspirations of promotion while I was wondering “Where is her husband in all this?”. Well Davon provided the missing piece; his discourse filled the hole in my existence with conspiracies like a homeless person does.

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“A Practical Guide to Anarchism” Chapter 1…

There was a time when the word Anarchist meant someone who is more extreme or revolutionary than the state they’re opposing. No one imagined there would be office-holders or statists who are more extreme than some anarchists. For someone who wants to be cavalier or even criminal in an otherwise stable society, what good does it do to be living in a den of thieves where the state is more unstable than you are?

The relationship between anarchism and statism seems like a fairy tale to us now; revolutionaries did what you’d expect them to do, the state cracked down on them like one would expect them to. But while we were being raised to think of anarchism as extreme, a college professor was muscled out of his job for wearing the wrong socks despite a lifetime of loyal service. What’s achieved by this winnowing is not advantage, the opposite of individualism is Authoritarianism and the opposite of revolution is Mediocrity. If you stamp out those things what you get is punishment without revolution, loyal subscribers being steamrolled without just cause…

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After the back pay stopped coming I spent every day reading or at the computer. I began each day by counting my small bills and planning out my two meals for the day with a nap in between, then count the bills again and go to bed. In the words of the musician Pat the Bunny, “When you’re unemployed that becomes your only job, there’s a lot of overtime and you never get a day off.”.

Selling all your possessions doesn’t even add up to one month’s bills, so I went “shopping” for a place to live. Davon’s uncle had died leaving a trailer near the fishing spot he told me about, and my moving in to take care of the place would be like a vacation (he said) a short distance from one of our favorite activities where we could go crack open some beers if I ever wanted to get out of the house.

The place was fully furnished, even inviting in a bachelor sort of way with dark wood paneling, a bed, armchair and TV; but it made me feel destitute because none of it was mine, I had just the shirt on my back. On my first night I came out of the bathroom to find the TV on and Davon sitting there in the armchair between the bed and the screen I had intended to rearrange.

I didn’t know he would be stopping by whenever he felt like it. He took out a couple of gourmet deli sandwiches, the kind that would cover half a frisbee and handed me one. There was an all-night movie marathon, and although I didn’t know when I’d be going to sleep I was glad for the food and the conversation.

He started talking about David Lynch movies, which can’t be the same David Lynch who directed the black-and-white film “The Elephant Man” before I was born…

“So Bill Pullman plays this rich guy in Beverly Hills with a big house and a really hot wife…” he was saying. “But he keeps having this dream where he’s wandering through the house and finds the two of them in bed together. His wife’s cheating, but then he’s suddenly replaced by this younger actor who’s a mechanic who gets a different kind of pussy every night, including the girl who’s played by the same actress. So she gets twice the sex scenes…”

“Wait wait wait you’re talking about the guy who goes around filming every scene himself?” I interrupted him.

“Yeah so if he wants to see a young girl’s tits, he just does a casting call and has them take off their shirts with this old man holding the camera.” he continued. “But what I was saying is, everything’s filmed in the wrong order. You don’t know what happened first, see what I mean?”

I nodded and got out of bed, heading to the bathroom half-thinking about catching some Z’s in there, when I passed a door with no knob I hadn’t noticed before. I opened it to reveal a laundry room with three machines (a washer, dryer and some kind of steam press) I didn’t know existed. They were new expensive ones too, salmon-colored like the ones in a home furnishing store.

“Ha!” I exclaimed like a delighted scavenger. “I’ve been taking my clothes to a laundromat! We can sell these!”

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“A Practical Guide to Anarchism” Chapter 2…

So if you are a project manager coming into a position of responsibility, let’s say in a business that is so cutthroat your department hasn’t made the short list in 30 years, the typical executive is a fiend who hides under a veneer of civility and you need to do the opposite. Keep yourself squeaky clean while maintaining an air of suspicion to draw out and identify the company’s snitches. Find out the craziest thing you could possibly do (let’s say “free internet for all” when you work for the power company), something that will crawl straight up the spine of anyone who hears it, and choose your own scandal.

As far as your chief of operations is concerned your orders were to “Follow last year’s playbook to the letter”, and you can even line up your staff to contend this vicious rumor saying they’ve never heard such a thing discussed in any context. The company’s self-made enforcer is being frivolous with such wild accusations and needs to face consequences for it. After putting these fears to rest you sit down with the enforcer, bringing a book called “A World Without Paid Internet” and start quoting it to stoke her delusions. When asked about this, make sure you unsealed the book in front of her to show you don’t know the first thing about such lies...

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Davon and I drove his jalopy station wagon to the point of land that was sort of a last resort in case we ever lost the house or there was an argument between us. But he was in good spirits (at least one of us was) while I simply needed a place to crash. The back of the car was full of our garbage, my plan was to dump it in the woods to make a cleaner space and in the meantime find a nice sunny patch of grass instead, which was the most lucid plan I was capable of thinking.

When I rose groggily out of the passenger seat, Davon was kneeling beside the little feeder creek untying the most pitiful-looking minnow traps I’ve ever seen, like something Liver-Eating Johnson would use. Then to my surprise there was a waking groan from the back of the station wagon and someone rose up out of a sleeping bag, wads of paper and other trash rolling to the side. Vic Mallansohn’s face appeared, bleary-eyed with his greasy black hair sticking out in all directions.

He was an ugly bear of a man and dragged himself out of the vehicle with a gape-mouthed yawn. The first thing he did was go straight past me to the water’s edge and start pulling in his fishing lines tied to sticks he had left planted along the shoreline. Each line had a bluegill at the end of it, which he unhooked and tossed into the muddy trench Davon and I had dug with our bare hands next to the shore, pocketing the used hooks.

When one is starving or living on foot, it seems like the Sun is always in your eyes. It moves to wherever you are, if you’re not careful it will fry your brain. I don’t know how long I stood there thinking about how much I despised him. How fat he was, how one person’s recreation is another person’s home, and how he did this to me. I had a little conversation with Davon about the wisdom of bringing him here. He was still friendly with Mallansohn while I was like a bearded third wheel. He was restringing the lines that have been the death of many a fish, and an idea dawned on me you will think is absolutely beyond the pale. Every kind of hunter brings himself close to death, he just knows that the fish at the other end will receive it and the guys on the shoreline are his buddies, right?

At dusk I took off my clothes and went for a little swim. In the dark I was able to dive to the bottom and come up for air again without anyone seeing me. There was a jingling sound coming from the top of one of Mallansohn’s sticks where he had tied a little bell. He got up off his fat ass and stumbled down to the shore, satisfied that he had a bluegill on the line which he wrapped around his fleshy hand to pull it in.

Suddenly something like a 130-pound fish yanked the line so hard it pulled him into the water by the arm. I don’t know if a fish that big can slice off a man’s fingers (one would think it would just cut down to the bone), but he let out an unmanly screech unable to let go or stop his arm from being pulled forward. Then I heard an engine start although the lights of the station wagon never came on. From the water I watched it back up straight into Mallansohn, knocking him down until the wheels were wet, and drive back out again.

I didn’t think there were 100-pound fish in that lake, but whatever was on that line wasn’t what did him in it just held him in place. Shocked at what I had just seen, I floated back to shore as exhausted as if I had just fought with the Devil. Mallansohn was nowhere to be found, and I crawled weakly into the front seat and passed out.

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In the morning I got out of the vehicle and staggered down to the water where there were tire tracks as if we had launched a boat. Davon was whistling and I turned around to a strange sight; he had gotten out a cooler I didn’t know about and was standing at the table that was chained to a tree flipping burgers. He had sliced an enormous tomato (the first one I’d seen in weeks) and an onion and spread them out on a tablecloth, and he was wearing an apron. There was a head of lettuce as well, some beers and there was a radio playing and an electric fan hooked up to the car battery.

He handed out paper plates and napkins and I ate hungrily in silence, wondering where my brain had been. When I looked up again he wasn’t there, the plates and napkins on the table were blowing away and I rushed to secure them. I bent down to pick up some kind of wrapper and written on it (you’ll think this is funny) were the words “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst” (“We knew nothing about this”), which gave me an idea of what to say if I was ever asked about Mallansohn’s disappearance during our sojourn. I opened the cooler to find a case of beers, took one with me to the passenger side of the vehicle and got some more rest.

“And when you woke up again you were at a party?” the gruesome social worker asked me.

“Yes a house party. Davon must have driven us there although I don’t recall getting out of the car. I was in a sleeping bag in the middle of the living room with a bunch of other bags. There were multiple girls there playing whatever game you play when a guy’s asleep; I mean I didn’t have marker on my face or anything, they were nice girls. One of them I ended up knowing.”

“And this is the same girl you spoke of earlier?”

“Yes but as Davon would say things can happen in the wrong order. I don’t know if I first met her at the party and that’s how my troubles began, or if we ran into each other because of the jaunt where what’s-his-face died and disappeared...”

An old rotary-style phone was ringing somewhere in the next room. He got up from the dingy little table and went to answer it while I waited.

“Yes? Yes Mrs. Mallansohn we found him. Yes he’s here with me now and I’m about to call them...”

I bolted up from the chair and ran out the door.

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“If a guest shows up uninvited, do you burn your house down to keep them away? I’d be a teenage virgin jerking off in my bedroom, if I wasn’t a 20-year-old virgin who doesn’t have a bedroom!”

-Pat the Bunny