Dana Spiotta - Eat the Document

“Maybe.” She shrugged and turned a page in her book.

“Miranda.”

She looked at her watch and got up. “I’ll try.”

The GABA Group plenary was not promoted, and people heard about it only through word of mouth. Despite that (or because of that) everyone in the Black House, including Sissy and Miranda, went.

Nash was interjecting during a discussion on direct action, not leading, of course, but moderating, guiding. Facilitating. Miranda thought, Ha, right. He had been talking for at least fifteen minutes.

“It is not so much that we do direct action to get a certain result, you know, like pass anti-global-warming legislation,” he said. “We do an action for the action itself. Our act is the end, the point.”

“But we do also want to direct the action at something, don’t we?” Miranda says.

“Sure, we do. But I’m saying in our quest for whatever goals we have, we should make sure the tactics themselves are reflective of those goals. We dance in the street and stop traffic not because we want to be on TV to get our message out but because we like to dance in the street. It’s the world we want to live in.” Nash took a deep breath and smiled in spite of himself. “It is in itself organic and original and full of a delicious solidarity that is usually difficult to come by.”

“Or we could just talk about actions and never do them. Not dance but think about dancing. That would be really subversive,” she said flatly and looked at the ground beneath her sneakers.

Miranda hated when Nash used words like organic and solidarity . He sounded like an old hippie then, worse, like a caricature of a hippie. He of all people should know subversion started with the language you used. But Miranda couldn’t help but feel bad for Nash, despite her hurt feelings. And she knew the other kids weren’t really listening. The guy with the black-and-green flag on his jean jacket? He just couldn’t wait to break the window of a Starbucks for whatever reason.

“I have some plans for an action we should do downtown. The new shopping-oriented downtown. We dress in business suits and are stationed in all different locations around Fourth Avenue. And just at 12:30 p.m., the most trafficked time of day, we all head toward the traffic island at the center of the street. We approach at precisely the same time, briefcases in hand. Incidentally, this is where all the surveillance cameras converge.”

Nash crossed his legs. Miranda thought he should sound less calm and more angry. He should sound like there was something at stake. But that wasn’t even it. He couldn’t resist himself, could he?

“So we approach the traffic island at precisely the same time, maybe thirty or forty of us. The clothes have to be perfect. It is fine if we have dreadlocks sticking out or whatever, but it must be suits and ties and briefcases. Women can wear the skirt and jacket, the power bow. The point is to look uniform and of an easily identifiable type. We originally wanted car-mounted sound systems to play Swan Lake or something. But I think we would be arrested in no time for public loudspeakers without a permit.”

“So what?” The green-and-black flag guy. “Let them arrest us.”

“Well, if we get arrested we can’t do the action. The object is not to merely be arrested. At least, that is not my object,” Nash said. “We do a kind of Busby Berkeley synchronized dance, a serious, deadpan, perfectly synchronized show, with briefcases aloft. We stop people going into the stores and in their frenzy of shopping, not because we physically block them but because we entertain them for a moment, we amuse them, intrigue them. There among the glittering billboards corporations pay thousands for, we engage everyone’s attention out of sheer whimsy.” A girl spoke out from the back of the crowd. “So what the hell is the point? Are we going to even have information for people about the sweatshops that produce the Gap shirts they are buying? Or the way their fast-food restaurants are destroying the ecosystem?” The tone of her voice — the tenor of the earnest whine — contained a sort of tremolo that hung perpetually between an accusation and a dissolve of weary, resigned tears. Miranda found it tremendously unpleasant. “What is the point?” she repeated.

“The point is for us, the players, and perhaps them, the audience, to feel for one second as if we didn’t have AOL Time Warner or Viacom tattooed on our asses,” Nash said. Miranda chewed at her fingernail. He was right.

“And disruption is liberating, especially if it is a formal, organized disruption,” Miranda said. Nash smiled at her. “Mere chaos causes anxiety. Preaching didactically causes boredom. But a formal disruption—”

“Then it approaches beauty of a kind,” Nash said. “Then you begin to really be dangerous.”

After the meeting, she went outside to smoke one of her edge-erasing hash tokes. Nash sat by himself drinking a soda. She walked right past him to where Sissy stood talking to another girl. She left with Sissy, arm in arm, until the next scheduled group began.

The so-called hactivists were up next — the Net geek guys that advocated hacker-type direct action on the Web. She wanted to hear about this, but she especially wanted to see them, the ones who could break laws and destroy things all from the comfort of their homes. Miranda didn’t trust these guys — and naturally, they were all guys. She imagined them to be the same pale, socially isolated creeps who chronically masturbated to Internet porn — not even photos of real women but those cartoon-videogame chicks, the gun-wielding pinups with their glutes bursting out of torn, tight short shorts, all made by some other sweaty, pale guy in a room somewhere. She wanted to check out the kinds of guys who were turned on by these virtual, man-drawn women.

A group of young men crowded the back of the store. They didn’t look all that different from the usual crowd, save a few skinny guys in T-shirts that said OPEN SOURCE or COPY LEFT — GNU/LINUX or simply FUCK MICROSOFT. Nash sat toward the front with a thinly veiled expression of condescension. All at once Miranda felt bad for him again. She wanted to take Nash by the hand and show him how to use Listservs or something. And then, out of nowhere, she thought it. She thought about Nash, in her room at the Black House, in her space. She thought of kissing him and how he would hesitate at first and then kiss her back. She imagined undressing herself and pulling him down on the bed. She imagined his adoring expression. It excited her to be eighteen to someone like Nash. So much more fun than being eighteen to someone who was also eighteen. She really flushed thinking this, and Nash smiled at her because she was staring at him, and she quickly looked away. She turned to the front of the room, where some e-freak pornographer was about to begin.

It was Josh. Josh Marshall, from her old high school. He graduated two classes ahead of her, and certainly she didn’t know him very well, but she used to see him every day. He was not a sweaty little social misfit. No, Josh Marshall was the straightest boy she could imagine. Tall and good looking in an unremarkable, clean way. He wore a uniform of button-down shirt, flat-front khakis or tidy jeans, and brown loafers. Shirts always tucked in.

“Mostly what I thought we could go over is how denial-of-service or flood attacks work and — my specialty — how to hijack sites. You might remember how the address for the IMF meetings was redirected to the green anarchist site. This lasted for about twenty hours. Their site was not altered, we just inserted a program that redirected anyone accessing their address to another site.”

He glanced at her and smiled in recognition. He had never smiled at her in high school. Miranda tried to piece it all together. Certainly Josh was a smart guy. But he was so sunny and so destined for full-steamed establishment success. As he spoke she began to understand. His normalcy was so extreme as to be perverse. No one was that clean-cut, that inadvertent, that unobtrusive. That shy.