Dana Spiotta - Eat the Document

You know, she doesn’t have one baby picture of herself? I think that is odd. She’s estranged from her parents, but I presume they exist somewhere. For some reason she just left all that behind.

Someone apparently decided that nobody wants brown cars anymore. Some fifteen-year-old, no doubt, in some information-gathering test situation declared brown old looking, uncool, or it made him not want to drive. And that was that.

THE PILLS CAME in a small opaque plastic bottle. He pressed down hard on the cap as he turned it to open. Fastened to the bottle was a folded piece of paper with chemical chain diagrams, case studies and long lists of side effects. Charts with percentages of groups that experienced some of (but not limited to) the following: peripheral neuropathy; facial and testicular edema; impotence; stroke; hallucinations; myocardial infarction; sudden, unexplained death.

The pills were ovule, innocent shapes. Peaceful shapes. It was called Blythin. The improved supplement to his Nepenthex regimen. He swallowed two. Because. This was a new one, taken to augment the others he already took. You don’t ever stop taking any of them, you just add new ones or alter dosages. But things had gotten so bad lately.

Henry couldn’t sleep, and he decided to take a bath. He put on the lights everywhere in his house. If he were to look out his windows (he never did, particularly at night), he would see faces looking back (or probably he would), so he pulled all of his curtains closed. He didn’t even like to think about the covered windows because he could imagine so easily what he feared seeing. He also, for similar reasons, avoided mirrors. It hadn’t been quite this bad before. Things were getting worse. He couldn’t take showers anymore because he couldn’t hear well enough through the rush of water (hear what exactly?). But he could take a bath, in the middle of the night, with the door to the bathroom open, and most times make it to the morning undisturbed. Then he could take an exhausted drop into bed. He lay there and listened. His breathing.

Henry is in a plane again. This is a B-52. It is predawn darkness. He is in the tub, but he knows that he is flying over Quang Binh Province. He hears the loud-to-faint sound of bombs being dropped. He looks beneath him through the open hatch. The sky is lit up by showers of white phosphorus, arching in floral, organic, symmetrical shapes; the lines they describe are graceful. They are otherworldly, these electric trails and their already fading illumination. Light reflects off the water, glitter sparkles in the smoke. Then the bombs make contact, and beneath them and behind them he can see explosions.

Henry no longer feels the water on his limbs; he no longer sees the bathroom. He is on the ground, beneath the plane, not suddenly but as if he had followed the bomb down, he sees the ground come closer and closer in silent jump cuts. Henry hits the ground running, and he sees an explosion and then feels the breath sucked right out of his lungs, out of everything around him. The heavens are ignited, and the air has collapsed. Then he feels the burning on his skin. Something sticky on his skin, eating it. He runs and it burns worse, burrowing into the flesh. It has a gasoline stench. He knows what it is. It is jelling to his back and arms. He rubs at it, and it doesn’t come off, it just burns his hands. He jumps into a swampy tide pool, covers himself in water. But it still sticks, and he can really smell it now, gasoline, burning plastic, and burning flesh. NP2, or Super Napalm. He doesn’t feel anything but numb, but he watches the stuff burn through the layers of skin to the bone. He yelps and clamps his hand on it. It seems to stop, somewhat, but as soon as he lifts his hand it resumes burning down into him.

Henry lurched in his bath and then leaned over the side of the tub and vomited. There was some white, chalky goo, which may have been the Blythin. He can’t quite breathe. I am being followed by fire and brimstone, but fire that burns with no flame, just a chemical constancy. He still smelled a sharp whiff of gasoline. They frightened him, these smells from nowhere, their conjured passage from imagination into experience. How can you know things you don’t know?

MIRANDA EXPECTED August 5 (the date of major tests every year, ostensibly because it was the anniversary of some infamous Seattle Wobbly action in the 1920s) to be a focus for all the actions Nash’s groups discussed. The day came and went, with lots of groups participating, but none of Nash’s did anything. And nothing was said about it. Labor Day weekend was also full of various tests and actions. Again, nothing from Nash’s groups and nothing said about it. By the next planning meeting, this one of the Sovereign Nation of Mystic Diggers and Levelers, it finally dawned on Miranda what Nash was really up to. His groups had no intention of executing any of it. None of them. Not the Barcode Remixers. (They made fake bar code stickers that would replace existing ones. Everything rang up at five or ten cents. This was strictly for the chain, nonunion supermarkets.) Not the New American Provos (inspired by the antiwork Dutch provos, they got jobs at Wal-Mart and then executed ad hoc sabotages). Not the Radical Juxtaposeurs (they rented mainstream films from Blockbuster and dubbed fake commercials onto the beginnings of the tapes to imply dislocated, ominous, disturbing things). The same weird misfits, week after week, with different names and new ideas, new actions, long discussions of smart-ass tactics and tests. But nothing ever acted on. Of course: para-activists, not actually acting but running beside. No one ever said it, you would never know unless you had gone to meetings and paid attention. But it sort of made sense: he always said the actions were for their benefit, not to educate or humiliate the public, even the most evil of corporate bureaucrats. The actions were about keeping their own resistance vital. Direct action to keep you from being absorbed and destroyed. To remind you of what was what. Nash, she realized, had no plans to save the world, or enlighten people or change anything. She was both appalled and impressed, and she couldn’t wait until the day’s meetings were finished and she could talk to him. She wanted to let him know she’d figured it out.

“Want one?” he said, after everyone left. He held up a twenty-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola, its plastic hourglass shape in imitation of or homage to the old eight-ounce glass bottles.

“Once,” she said, “I had this conversation with my elementary school soccer coach.”

“Where was this?” he asked.

“Bellevue. Just on the other side of the lake. We had a great game, and the coach took us out for pizza after. Even in our pretty, suburban, tree-lined town, there was a desperate-looking man outside the pizzeria asking for money.”

“Bellevue, Woodinville, Avondale. Where do they get these names? I mean honestly, Bellevue, who are they fooling with that?” Nash started to get up. Miranda followed.

“We all walked by him, already knowing somehow to ignore him, like how old are you when you learn this? Do any of us even remember when we learned this? So we were stuffing our faces with that doughy pizza and talking about the game.” As soon as they were outside Miranda pulled out one of Sissy’s hash-laced Marlboros.

“I don’t believe you,” Nash said, pointing at the Marlboro package. She shrugged and inhaled.

“It’s more subversive than capitulation or straight opposition to have deliberate, conscious contradictions,” she said.

“Of course, how could I think otherwise?” he said.

Miranda wasn’t flirting, but she did like the way older men (she assumed it was a function of age, even though she had no experience with any other older men in this context) found her weaknesses somehow endearing. And someone like Nash could appreciate her ability to run his game right back at him, to underline his most treasured vanities. He could appreciate the rare form of attention that it indicated; she listened carefully to everything he said to her. After all, what was the point of any of it unless someone paid attention?