Dana Spiotta - Eat the Document

“We headed back to the van and walked past the guy lying outside. No one looked at him, and it was even worse because we were all jolly and overfull,” Miranda said.

“You, Miranda, run back and give him your allowance.” Miranda stared at Nash for a long time. He crossed his arms and smiled at her.

“Look, I only smoke hash-lined cigarettes that I get for free or steal.”

“And you realized then and there that you, and you alone, were different, special even. Yes, you, Joan, would save France from the English.”

“And then I only smoke them around people like you, who are so bothered by what other people do.” And she smiled back, but she felt stung and didn’t want to talk to him anymore. She didn’t tell him about how she sat in the van the whole ride from the pizzeria staring out the window, ignoring her teammates. She stared at the big houses set back from the road and remembered when her father drove her family by the public housing projects in the city, and how the people loitering outside glanced at her through her car window, and she looked away.

Miranda sat silently in the back of the bus and listened to the singsong voices of the other girls. The lilt of their young, carefree voices. Finally, she couldn’t help it, and she blurted out, “How can you be happy when there are people with no homes and no food? How?” There was a momentary silence. Then one of the other girls started giggling. And then another girl laughed.

“You have to be an idiot,” Miranda said with a righteous hiss at the girl.

“Well, I must be a complete idiot, because I am hap-hap-happy!” Giggle. Heh, heh. Miranda felt her face get red and hot tears start.

When they got back to school, Mr. Jameson, the soccer coach, asked her to wait a minute. She nodded and wiped her nose. He went past the seat she was in and sat across the aisle from her. He turned to her with a serious frown from which he pressed a tight smile.

“Miranda, you have to understand—” he said. She fixed her gaze on him. She really wanted to understand.

“There are people who are born into this world Indian chiefs and people who are born Indian braves. That’s just the way it is. And that is the way it will always be. Your not enjoying your life won’t help change that. It will just make you unhappy.”

That was his answer; he actually said that to her, and she knew right away that it was a lie. Everyone knows what’s true: you make the world a better place than you found it or you make it worse. Anyone who tells you that isn’t so is just making an excuse for his own inaction. At twelve she vowed to herself never to feel comfortable in the face of things obviously unfair and not right.

Miranda walked away from the bookstore toward the Black House wishing she had stayed and continued talking to Nash. She wished she hadn’t been so sensitive and hadn’t said good night and left. She wanted to talk about the soccer coach and what he had said. And what she really wanted to tell Nash. She’d figured it out, she finally got the joke: The Cult of Lasting Material Invasion, as it was called in this week’s flyer, didn’t ever do any of its actions. Or, another way of putting it, its actions were the discussion and planning of actions. This was a conceptual direct-action group, and no one ever spoke of it — you figured it out or you didn’t.

She wanted to tell him that she’d figured out his para-activist stance and it wasn’t good enough. Not nearly. That it was just another kind of lie. And that’s not all she wanted to tell him. See, it wasn’t just the hash Marlboros. She sometimes ate hamburgers from McDonald’s. She was indeed the one to take big, luxurious wads of toilet paper and inches of Kleenex at a time. It got even worse. When no one was looking, she sometimes threw stuff in the garbage. Newspapers and glass bottles. Easily recyclable stuff. Right in the garbage. Shoved it down so it was buried. Even her mother didn’t throw that stuff in the garbage. Because she couldn’t help it, she just did it and felt guilty about it. That was part of why she talked to Nash in the first place. Because she saw him there, at the meetings, drinking a Coca-Cola.

And finally she wanted to tell him that the world offered horrendous terms, a terrible, huge price was paid in actual suffering, and if you didn’t try to change that or mitigate that, your life was indefensible, wasn’t it? And if he was being clever, or cynical, in the face of that, well, it was wrong. And if she was overly righteous and simpleminded about things, then so what? And maybe she wanted to say something else, but she didn’t even know what that was yet.

HENRY SAT through one of Nash’s meetings and then lingered after all the kids left. Miranda wasn’t in, and Nash realized he had spent the evening wondering why. He had been waiting to talk to her all day. It had always been this way with women and Nash. He rarely felt struck, but when he was he would discover the woman somehow insinuated into the deep reaches of his psyche in some complicated way. She became an essential component of his well-being. He was glad Henry was there to distract him.

Henry drank his beer lying out on top of the common table. Nash put on some very old Appalachian folk music (Harry Smith’s Anthology that Sissy burned for Miranda and Miranda lent to Nash) and started to shut the place down for the night.

“How come you are never around anymore?” Nash said. Henry shrugged. He looked thinner than ever. He smelled of old beer and cigarettes.

“Do you think it’s possible—” Henry started.

“What?” Nash said. Dock Boggs was singing about honey and sugar through some fast banjo.

“Nothing.” Henry finished his beer and pulled another from the six-pack. “Hey, it’s your birthday, isn’t it? You’re fifty now.”

“Not till next week,” Nash said.

“Happy birthday, man.”

Nash waved it off.

“Here’s to fifty,” Henry said. “The beginning of the end. I feel every minute of my fifty-two years, I swear it, I wear them every day.”

“It’s funny, I don’t feel fifty,” Nash said.

Henry turned on his side, propped his head on his hand and studied the flyers on the table.

“I’m turning fifty, and it is just now dawning on me that I have limited time,” Nash said. “No kidding. I always felt my life was circumscribed, but I believed it was because of me, because of the choices I made. Now I realize — and only now, I am ashamed to say — that my life is circumscribed by definition. We are all circumscribed by the finite terms, you know? There is a whole world of things I missed out on and will never experience. Whatever I have done, there is an endless amount I have not done. Do you know what that tells me?”

Henry shook his head.

“It tells me it is not meant to be this all-encompassing journey. It is not meant to be catholic or encyclopedic. By now I have carved some grooves in this life. A few. What I need to do is hunker down and make those grooves deep and indelible. Not the time to dig new ones, you know?”

Henry sat up. “I guess. But.”

“The time now is for depth. Make that grab for profundity.”

“But.”

“Yeah?”

“What if they are the wrong grooves? What if you made mistakes? Shouldn’t you try to make it right, no matter how late it is?”

“Well, of course.”

“Hey, can I ask you something?” Henry said.

“What?”

“Do you know what kind of plastic explosive works best with a delayed fuse?”

Nash stopped midswig on his beer and looked sideways at Henry. “No, I don’t know the answer to that. Why do you want to know?”

“Nothing. It’s just information I’d like to have, you know, in case. I thought you might know because you seem to know a lot about plastic.”