Bewere the Night

(NOTHING BUT) FLOWERS by Nick Mamatas

Amber’s two greatest obstacles, she decided, were her journal which she still wrote in every night, though she had no light and didn’t bother checking what she had written during the day when she could actually see the pages, and the gasoline she used to keep warm when it got very cold in the tree house.

She was conflicted about using tampons instead of moss, even though the pack had all talked about it and consensed that the tampons were okay, so long as they were shoplifted. Noliked blood. And that put Amber on shopping duty, which led her back to the gas, which she actually had to buy after working the sign, and little notepads and pens. There was something sexist about all of it, she was sure—the boys got to spend more time in the woods and didn’t have to think about her period except when one of them was horny for her at the wrong time, and they used most of the gas for direct action, which she was not enthusiastic about anymore.

Then there was the whole idea of even thinking about obstacle. And sexism. More symbolic thought bullshit. Amber wrote all this down in the dark of her platform—there was a big gibbous moon tonight but the canopy of the woods blocked most of it and the light pollution from the city. Amber decided that in the dark symbolic thought didn’t count so much because she could never really be sure that the letters she wrote in her cramped hand would ever be legible to anyone, even herself.

The branches rustled and “Hey” said a voice and Amber said back, “Hey Berg.”

“How did you know it was me?”

“You still smell of soap,” Amber said. “In the dark, things are easier to smell. I’m sure you smell me.”

He laughed, nervous. “Sorry about that.” Berg, on his hands and knees awkwardly crawled over to Amber and nuzzled, finding her dreds, her neck. She wrapped her limbs, all four of them, around Berg’s skinny torso, and then bit into his shoulder. First, playfully, but she didn’t stop till after Berg yelped and tried to squirm away.

“That a no?” Berg asked.

Amber grunted.

“That a no-symbolic-thought thing?”

In the dark, Amber shrugged extensively enough that Berg could make out the gesture.

“I guess I don’t get that part of it. Didn’t you come here because of a theoretical realization? Zerzan? Jensen? Species Traitor?”

“You did,” Amber said. Neither Berg nor Amber said anything for a minute or so after that.

“Amber?”

“I’m deciding.”

Wind through the branches. Some shuffling around. You could almost hear the blood in their bodies, coursing.

“Okay.” Berg surged forward and got fingernails to his cheek from it.

“Okay I’ll tell you. Want to check out a copy of Proletarian Worker?”

“Huh?”

“It was a negative dialectic.” She giggled. Redwood went on about negative dialectics all the time. The term had become a joke amongst the pack. “I was a socialist in school. Sold the paper every Saturday, went to demos and meetings all the time. Always tabling at the student union, sending around petitions, standing up in class and denouncing marginal economics or sociobiology or old Maoist professors for not being the Trotskyists. You know, the usual.”

“Yeah, of course. PW is like blight. They were always trying to take over movements and coalitions and the paper was so awful.”

“I know, I know,” Amber said. “Anyway, one time we had this educational on black self-determination and one of the comrades during her talk mentioned that in Haiti during the slave rebellion of 1791 the battle flag of the rebelling slaves was a white baby impaled on a pike.”

“Yeah … ” Berg said.

“Yeah, so anyway, after the meeting—and you know it was all white people—everyone was all like, ‘Yes, that’s us. We can do that if we had to.’ And half the comrades couldn’t even get up on time to sell the paper on Saturdays at the park, and their dues were always late, and none of them ever did their reading and—”

“So? You sound like an MBA or a sorority sister planning a bake sale.” Something flew at Berg. He jerked his head to the side and it flew past him.

“Shut up,” Amber said. “No, it was just all the lies, all the posing. And I was doing it too. They were lying to themselves, to me, to one another. ‘Yeah, kill that white baby and wave his ass around.’ Could I do it? No, I didn’t think so, and I didn’t think any of the comrades could either. It wasn’t authentic, we didn’t really feel that kind of rage. That dead baby didn’t belong to us—it was just a symbol of how everyone was going to be a hero of the revolution one day. So I quit. The party and symbolic thought. Well, the best I could.’’

“And then?”

“And then I met Salmon and he turned me on to primitivism and consensus politics and then after we both dropped out of State we came here and made a platform. I always loved nature, wasn’t one of those boring ‘political vegans’, so it fit. We were both looking for something, Salmon and me, though he was further along of course. It wasn’t horizontal recruitment. Anyway, after the electricity got cut off in his apartment, we took it as a sign—into the woods.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“But mostly with the honesty. I like that.”

“Cool,” Berg said. “So anyway, if we’re not going to fuck, I guess I’ll go fuck some shit up now.”

“Okay,” Amber said. “See ya.”

“Coming?”

“No. I mean, yeah, go ahead. Trash that shit. I don’t want to tonight. That’s what’s freedom all’s about, right?”

Berg and Redwood and Salmon met at Berg’s little lab—Berg had a survival tent covered haphazardly in leafy branches on ground level, a camp stove, and a pair of repurposed saucepans. Other things too. He’d come with them, just the month before. Sometimes it takes a bit for the shell of civilization to slough off, but for now he was allowed his technology provided he put it toward the ends of the movement. With Amber’s gasoline and a few bars of shoplifted soap from a Dollar Tree, Berg prepared the napalm. The little pots made for an okay double boiler. Some water was heated in the lower boiler as Berg shaved the soap. Then, off the stove and onto a rock, quick quick before the water cools. The gasoline into the top boiler and then the soap—a 1:1 ratio. A drizzle of gas, a tiny tongue of soap. Stir with a thick twig. Some more gasoline, a handful of soap shavings sprinkled like mozzarella cheese through Berg’s fingers. Stirring and stirring, the liquid grew viscous and thick. Twice more, three potfuls, six Mason jars. Rags dipped in spilled gas. Two jars to a man, held in pockets of military surplus jackets. Salmon had the matches; he kept them in his boot.

They walked to the lip of the highway without a word except for Redwood who said, “Don’t fall down with this shit in your pockets,” and they didn’t. The highway was a target-rich environment. Berg and Salmon took off to the left though Salmon found the first fork onto a service road and walked down it. Redwood to the right. To the Ford dealership, rich with oversized trucks and SUVs. There were some Fusions too, but they’d burn like the rest. To a Starbucks, closed with chairs on the tables. And Redwood, always a bit madder than one should be and taller as well, to a gas station. Shell, those butchers of the Ogoni people, stranglers of the world. An open one, though no cars were at the pumps. Redwood went to the little booth and knocked on the Plexiglas. He had to bend down to make eye contact with the employee, a kid. High school. No stake in the system, even if he didn’t realize it. Redwood had the words FUCK YOU scrawled in oil across his forehead, his cheeks, his nose. There’d be security camera footage and photos, but they wouldn’t be published everywhere at least and the published pics would have to be airbrushed, Photoshopped, and some detail would be lost.

“I’ve got a gun under here,” the kid said. Bored kids are always very interested in potentially getting to shoot somebody.

“You’re going to shoot me for the privilege of staying in a cold plastic box pumping gas for rich bastards for your junk food money?” Redwood asked. “Here, I’ll help you out with that.” A lighter from his left hand pocket, the first jar, an oily rag through the hole in the top from his right, a casual backwards toss and Redwood started running because he heard the crash of broken glass, his long legs taking him out into the road. For kicks, Redwood lit the other rag, threw the second jar behind his back, and ran. Jellied fire spread across two lanes of blacktop faster even than Redwood’s long legs could take him.

In the trees, Amber almost slept to the sounds of helicopters flying low, to the knives of spotlights sweeping through the forest, setting night birds to fly.

When Redwood wasn’t around the next morning, the band decided rather quickly that of course he had been captured by the police and was now being held as a political prisoner in the county lock-up.

“What are we going to do?” Berg asked.

“What do you mean do?” Salmon asked.

“You know, contact sympathizers, hold a demo, do basic prison support work?”

“Ha!” Amber said, “that’s herd thinking, not pack thinking.” Salmon had told her something similar about a month prior, when she wondered if the crew couldn’t liberate extra food during their Dumpster diving expeditions and deliver them to the homeless. We’re homeless, Salmon had pointed out. But we’re a pack, not lone wolves and not a herd.

“Well, what if the pigs come after us, if Redwood tells them about us?” Berg asked. Amber didn’t know what to say to that. “You can’t live a free life in prison, pretty much by definition. I mean if freedom were just an individual subjectivity, you could be ‘free’ taking English literature courses or interning at Google.”

“So? We’re out here trying to be free; we’re not looking to free everyone else, or even anyone else,” Salmon said. “In fact, you’re going to have to face facts, we’ll need a massive population crash in the first place to really experience freedom. It’s civilization and its diseases and wars that’ll bring that about. Our job is to survi—”

“Then why the hell did I napalm half a dozen Hummers last night?” Berg threw up his arms. His voice was birdy and shrill. “With that logic, the best thing I can do for the cause of human freedom is go to work for Exxon or Blackwater, I could—”

The boys argued. Free free free. It was all symbolic thought, Amber realized quickly enough, but underneath the rhetoric was something else. Monkey rivalry. Chest-bumping and displays. Or mating calls, birdsongs. But then the symbolic thought. After that comes the division of labor—we fuck shit up, you stay here. Then agriculture. Domestication of the wolves who comes too close to the fire. Stories of spirits in the wind, of dead ancestors. Scratch out a language on the sides of rocks. Better build a temple. And from there pharaohs and slaves, kings and peasants, CEOs and transfats and Twitter and smokestacks, and we’re all prisoners of civilization. Now the only thing left to do is wonder whether the planet will die in a nuclear holocaust, or if the melting icecaps will drown the soldiers in their ICBM silos first. Amber wandered off, not to her platform, but just to go out deeper into the woods to be really human. What was that line—Running on emptiness. Get out there and be, and don’t think about what “be” means.

Amber heard the police in the woods. They were easy enough to avoid. They stumbled over twigs and leaves, their communication devices crackled and whined. She didn’t bother trying to divine their motives or outthink them. They were just other noises, loud ones to walk away from. Soothing ones beckoned and she found a stream and followed it, feet wet on the rocks, a careful leap over the branch-dams of the beavers. There were smells too, obvious ones. Plastic and cooked meat. Amber had eaten nothing but berries and mushrooms and the occasional hastily stolen Hostess Cupcake jammed into her mouth whole during the latest shoplifting spree. Her stomach growled.

There was a family—little Asian girl in purple with giant boots, white parents in colors they probably didn’t even realize matched the environment. Khaki pants like the dirt of the clearing, green and brown tops. Camouflage by way of accident of demographics and fashion trends. They had tents, fancier than Berg’s, and a camp stove, fancier than Berg’s, and some solar power contraption that was probably also a stove but didn’t seem to work right as the father was hunched over it, and the parents both had the white cords of iPod headphones hanging down their torsos. They were silent. The girl played with leaves, the mother was fuming about something with her chin high and hands on her hips. Amber realized that there should be four, not three. A boy, slightly older, cartoons on his sleeping bag. They weren’t food, they weren’t anyone she could talk to, they weren’t threatening her with violence as the police did simply by existing and by marching through the woods with their sticks and their guns and their dogs, so she left the family behind.

The sun had moved into the orange of afternoon when Amber heard the yawp and the thrashing about that attracted her attention next. It had been hours, though she wasn’t aware of the passage of time except when the shouting brought her back into the world of symbolic thought, and then only because it was so ironic. If there was anything at all left of humanity after tens of thousands of years of civilization and symbol-making that could be considered real and pure and true, it was a scream of fear. A boy’s voice, broken like a girl’s from shock and rage, and then there were echoes. Responses. A woman’s voice shrieked, “Jeremy!” and the woods grew restive.

Amber had heard screams before. When Salmon had twisted his ankle. When Redwood and her were up on her platform fucking like wolves. The day before Berg had found the pack, when he was tramping through the forest shouting both parts of the fight with his father that had sent him into the woods with his camping gear and a dog-eared copy of Future Primitive. He screamed again when Salmon had torn it apart in front of his face. But this scream was different. It hadn’t been swallowed up by the echoless trees and hills. The police were alive in the woods now, shouting again through megaphones and amplifiers. The woman couldn’t stop shrieking Jeremy! The little girl was whooping too, like a bird.

Amber didn’t even mean to walk toward the first scream—why would she? But she strode right into it. Not in a clearing, but in a tight clump of the thick-trunked trees, where the woods were dark. And she saw the boy. And the boy held a stick. And at the end of the stick was much of an eye. And just a foot or so beyond the tip of the stick was Redwood, his face wrinkled and brown like bark, a gouge where his eye had been, his lipless mouth open wide. He gasped when he saw Amber, and Amber’s knees buckled from the stench of cooked meat. The boy dropped the stick and his smile and ran. Amber vomited into her hands. Redwood tried to talk but the scream was all he had. He keened, a lung pushing air through a scored and warped tube of flesh. In his remaining eye was a message. A glare. Amber noticed that his eyelashes, which she always liked because they were long like she was always told a girl’s should be, were gone.

Amber had gone back for her journal, and that is what saved her. Despite the copter and the chain of police and volunteers—mostly portly militia types with barely legal firearms slung uselessly across their backs—marching in a long single file across the woods, she was huddled on her platform and missed. The boys had been picked up. Arson. Redwood was dead, or probably was anyway. There was nothing to keep her. The next morning she dropped from her platform, cut off her dreds with a sharp rock, and moved into town. There were enough crusties on the street to blend in with and she was a pretty girl, even with a haircut by hack. The city was easy. Dumpster dive behind the yuppie supermarket, wash in the library, spread for someone when it rained, and huff and write in her journal with her eyes closed. She showered a lot, standing in a puddle of black water, till she smelled like soap, smelled like Berg.

It was hard for Amber to get used to talking all the time, to street signs and clothing with logos on them. The world was a huge advertisement for itself, and it stank.

Amber spent most of her days outside the county courthouse in the part of town that was all pillars and thick slabs of concrete from the old days, and littered with the homeless and ratty fast food joints from the now. She was a protestor, though the sign she held up was incomprehensible. She chanted, with the few other people who had rallied around Salmon and Berg, “Free Berg!” was a popular chant, and someone on an acoustic guitar had come up with some new lyrics to the old Lynyrd Skynyrd song. They had destroyed some property, but not very much, and hadn’t hurt anyone. Even Redwood had only hurt himself.

A thin man with significant sideburns asked Amber if she wanted to check out a copy of PW. Amber opened her mouth to tell him no when she saw the little Chinese girl, her knees high as she climbed the steps to the courthouse. She was on a leash and holding it was the mother. The father was there too, his hand clamped hard on the wrist of the boy who had once held a stick that had once been tipped with a man’s eye.

“Yeah, please,” she said.

The guy sidled up to her and opened to a two-page spread. “I wrote this article,” he explained. “It’s about how we, you know, reject anti-civ anarchism as fundamentally playing into the hands of the capitalists.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, it’s just giving up the fight. Individual acts of terror just bring state repression, and the fact is that we have seven billion people on this planet. If we all lived like hunter-gatherers, there would be a huge population crash. The only reason the bourgeoisie keeps the proletariat alive is because they don’t want to do any work themselves, and—”

Amber grabbed the paper. “Thanks. I’ll read it myself.”

“Okay, well we have meetings too … ” he reached into his messenger bag for a leaflet. Amber grinned inside. The local socialists were still a revolving door of stupid freshmen—she knew this shtick down cold.

“And that’s a dollar, by the way.” He tapped the edge of the paper. “What kind of socialist sells a newspaper?” Her eye wandered to the parking lot.

He nodded. “Yeah, well, see. The paper isn’t free. We live under capitalism, after all, and the printing press isn’t a worker collective, yet. Plus, when you just give out papers for free people don’t read them. When they pay a dollar, and some people even pay five to support the movement—”

“Look asshole, I’m not paying you a fucking dollar!”

He tried to grab the paper back but he was weak and Amber strong. She darted away from him and grabbed his messenger bag. “Paper for the people!” Amber shouted, and she flung the bag in the air. It rained copies of Proletarian Worker and then she kicked the socialist right in the knee, making his leg buckle. The other protestors cheered and then the cops, always itching for a chance to use their truncheons, were on them, but Amber was already gone.

Amber wasn’t worried. She wasn’t hopeful either. She was wedged in the hatch area of the SUV, one much nicer than civil servants could afford, and whose hood was hot to the touch. Unlocked too. Careless parents, the parents of that Chinese girl, of the boy with the stick. Had Amber been thinking, she would have even thought herself clever for showering and taking care of herself these past few days—surely she would have smelled like rotten wood and ripe human and filled the vehicle with fumes otherwise. Stink lines rising from the top of cartoon garbage can. She took a deep breath. Nothing but flowers. Not even a thought. No thought, no obstacles. Amber was beyond good and evil now, beyond boredom and engagement for that matter. She had her journal and the moon was full even as the sun still stood over the horizon. Plenty of light, but even she couldn’t read what she had written in her time living outside. There was something in those glyphs and strokes though, something older the words, older than symbols. Just what she had been wanting all along.

The family was sedate when they got in the car. The boy—Jeremy, but Amber didn’t think things like “Jeremy” now—wasn’t with them anymore. It didn’t matter. The drive seemed long. The sun had gone down and the moon sailed away, as if Amber was being taken around the curve of the world, away from the city and into the woods. But the trees she saw out her window were slaves of lawns, Holocaust survivors forced forever to mourn for their brethren whose bodies made their own coffins. Homes. McMansions. The car parked. The parents got out and collected the sleeping little girl from her car seat and took her away. The girl stared at Amber but didn’t say anything.

Amber slid out of the SUV easily enough and landed on her hands and knees. Everything smelled wrong. There were sounds, real ones. A breeze and crickets, but false sounds were more insistent. Tinny laughter. The buzzing of lightning trapped in wire cages. Wind in walls. She loped toward the family’s home and peered through the window when she reached it. They were watching TV, but it was all just flashes of color to her. She could smell them through the glass, smell how hot they were. Amber did have a final pair of symbolic thoughts before she threw herself through the window and took the child by the neck in her mouth and crunched, one last bit of culture before she finally sloughed off all that she had been like dirt on skin.

This is a fairy tale!

And I’m the hero!