Dana Spiotta - Eat the Document

“I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah, especially how am I going to explain it? Mel will take one look at me and she’ll know. They will never understand, not like you. You know what I am about. You know that I am not a joke, I am a genuine person. That I think about things.”

“Of course. And you don’t just think about them. You act on them and put yourself right on the line.”

“She’ll say it’s destructive and self-loathing.”

“You take your own hits. It is none of her business.”

“Screw this town. I should get out of here. I have to get away, I do. Oh God, I am starting to really hurt now.” She felt her lip with her tongue. She pulled herself up and went to the bathroom mirror. “I can’t believe it. I’m screwed. That dumb-ass. He thought I was making fun of him, but I don’t think I was. This better not scar.”

Caroline called Mel the next morning.

“I think you’re right. I should leave town.”

“Probably a good idea. Before there is any real reason to. A woman I know can help you. She lives in a women’s commune near New Harmon, New York. Ten miles north. She doesn’t have a phone, but I will send her a message that you are coming to see her.”

“What’s her name?”

“She goes by Mother Goose.”

“Really?”

“It’s these rural acid lesbians — everyone has a ‘special’ name, like Alice or Mother Goose or Medea.”

“Gotcha.” Caroline took a deep breath. “Mel?”

“Yeah.”

“We never expected it to go down like that. We were being so careful, I swear.”

“You’ve got to be joking.”

Caroline pressed her head against the phone, crying.

“It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s done,” Mel said.

“I know, I know.”

“And Caroline?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t call me or contact me again, okay? You have already made me an accessory after the fact, and I don’t want to be a part of your mess. I don’t want to hear from you again, ever.”

I AM THE center of the culture. I am genesis, herald, harbinger. The absolute germinal zero point — that’s me. I am the sun around which all the American else orbits. In fact, I am America, I exist more than other Americans. America is the center of the world, and I am the center of America. I am fifteen, white, middle class and male. Middle-aged men and women scurry for my attention. What Internet sites I visit. What I buy. What my desires are. What movies I watch. What and who I want; when and how I want it. People get paid a lot of money to think of how to get to me and mine.

Everything is geared to me. When you see those herky-jerky close-ups in action movies, where the camera jumps and chops its way in rather hyperly to the close-up of the hero, that is not for anyone but me. That is a movie being made to look like a video game or, rather, a computer game. That’s right — the superior technology aping the inferior technology, which was trying to be like a movie in the first place. The mannered, telltale visual grammar of the computer graphic becomes the cool thing itself. It identifies cool. The real question is, if you don’t get it, why are you watching it? It is for me and mine. It is legible to me and mine. It is our grammar, our visual slang and our rhythm — the speed and the super-percussive blowout sound effects. The most advanced technology making reference to and imitating inferior technology. Don’t worry if you don’t get it — that’s the point. You are excluded.

I should feel proud. By the mere fact of my youth, I am entitled to so much power. I feel the world spinning around me, the NASDAQ, the Dow, every index and indicator, the focus group, the cool hunters, the yearn forecasters — everything. So then why do I feel the way I do? Worse than ever I feel excluded. Worse than ever I feel singular, freakish, alone. I don’t care for computer gaming. Or computer gamers. I am not a fat, clammy kid who spends all my waking hours online and then either takes a machine gun to school in some perverse extension of the gaming life or ends up slumped among pizza boxes and tissues full of jizz as my fatty heart finally gives out, my game hand palsied and my parents full of guilt and halfhearted excuses about the distance of three-car garages, two-career marriages and six-thousand-square-foot houses.

That’s not me at all.

Yes, I spend time online, sure. Yes, I have the kind of pasty, fat body that will one day evolve into adult-onset diabetes if not total morbid obesity. Yes, I spend money on stuff. But there is nothing carefree about my life. Not anymore. Something has changed. I no longer have the privilege of total self-absorption. What I need right now more than anything is to figure out what her secret is. I have determined she is hiding something. I don’t think I am being overly imaginative, although all the crime books I read do affect my level of paranoia. They convey an ordered, systematic-but-rotten universe. And nothing is ever as it seems.

I followed her last night. I have started questioning everything about her. She teaches cooking twice a week — or so she claims. I waited until she left the house. She drove her Nissan even though it is only ten blocks to the community center. I got on my bike, which is a rare occurrence, and followed her. When I got to the community center, her car was parked there. I went down the halls, peeking slyly through the small windows in the classroom doors, the shatterproof glass panes with fine wire deeply embedded in them making everything a grid or like the crosshairs of a rifle. I heard my mother’s voice. I stopped and leaned against the wall. It was brick painted an industrial white. I stared at the speckled vinyl composite flooring. I couldn’t see in the classroom, and the people inside the room couldn’t see me.

(Incidentally, if you have never stalked someone close to you, I highly recommend it. Check out how it transforms them. How other they become, and how infinitely necessary and justified the stalking becomes when you realize how little you know about them, how mysterious every aspect of them seems with an at-a-distance-but-close examination.)

“It is important to rinse inside and outside the bird.”

Have you ever closed your eyes and listened to the sound of your own mother’s voice?

“You must pat the skin and the cavity of the bird dry with a paper towel. Otherwise the seasoning will not adhere as you wish it to.”

She exists, you know, wholly in the world apart from me. She spoke slowly and with deliberate emphasis. She sounded authoritative but not a bit shrill. No ugly breaths or underweighted sentence ends. Not girlish or apologetic. Not sexy either, but soft and serious.

“I like to put slivers of garlic and truffles under the skin of the breast. Also pats of butter. It makes the breast moist and the skin crisp and flavorful.”

But I wasn’t there to admire her voice or hear what she was saying. I’m not quite sure why I was doing this. But then I realized I was trying to place her accent. Does she truly have a California inflection, or is there a hint of the East Coast or Midwest to her speech? As I listened, leaning against the cold white brick, I couldn’t remember what any of these accents sound like.

I headed out to the parking lot. I sat behind some trees with a view of her Nissan Maxima. It is a metallic, high-saturation blue-green. I waited. What for, I don’t know. Did I think she would meet someone after class? Is it merely a liaison I suspect her of? I waited. I noticed several other cars in the lot were the same blue-green, no-name color. Or else a deep red flecked with gold underlights. Or shiny black. It occurred to me — have you noticed that there are no longer any beige or brown cars? I know they existed once — I have seen them on old TV shows like Hawaii Five-O or The Streets of San Francisco . Brown, chocolate brown, or that taupe beige color, like a raincoat. It is strange how color schemes of various times are different. People used to like browns, military greens, creams and mustards.