Dana Spiotta: Eat the Document

When Bobby and Mary first discussed the day they might have to go underground, it had actually sounded exciting. She could admit that. In case of emergency, you must do the following. The escape plan. Change name, hair color, clothes. Social Security number. Remember the first numbers must match where you say you are from. Don’t count on any luck. Count on bad luck. He made her go over all of it. She didn’t really understand then that if it happened (and yet they knew it would happen, didn’t they?), if all went well, all according to the plan, it would happen in silence and isolation. Unnoticed and unobserved. She would end up alone in an anonymous room somewhere with a pocked chenille bedspread and a watercolor landscape print in the same hues of mustard and green that were everywhere in the room and with only the TV on the broken swivel stand to remind her of the world at large.

By the second night, she had her new identity worked out. She then needed to determine what should happen next — not just how to evade detection but how to survive, to sustain herself for however long it would last. (She didn’t, at that point, define what “it” really was. She projected a few months into the future and then stopped.) Caroline, a.k.a. Freya, a.k.a. Mary, did not count on luck but took stock of her advantages. She could see only two: One, she was a woman. Two, she was plain.

She was not ugly, she was not pretty. But just that old-fashioned word, plain. If she left the room, or if you tried to recall her to others, or even yourself, the adjectives would be limited — not hard to come up with but hardly worth the bother. Thin, yes; neat, yes; hair much more light brown than red, which also made it hard to describe, not so much both-this-and-that as barely-this-and-barely-that; light, milky blue eyes and pinkish white body. Her skin tone gave off a peeled quality that left the line distinguishing lip from face indistinct, her pale eyebrows lost against the nearly same-colored forehead. Bobby once described her as looking like a heroine in a nineteenth-century novel. To her that meant sickly, bland looks that suggested small, prim virtues.

“No.” Bobby laughed. “They would have said you have a noble physiognomy.”

“Right.”

“A pleasing countenance.”

“What does that mean, exactly?”

“Uh, a good personality?” He laughed and tried to kiss her.

“How sweet.” She pulled away, frowning at him. He held her arm. She shrugged him off.

“No, listen.”

She didn’t look at him but examined the floor, lips pursed.

“You are so lovely,” he continued, his voice softer now. “True, it isn’t a loud-volume effect; it is subtle but quite deadly, I assure you.”

She turned a little toward him. He was staring at her so intently she looked back at the floor. She could feel herself flush.

“You have a sort of — I don’t really know how to explain it — what you might call an undertow, if that makes any sense. The longer I’m with you, the more I want to be with you. It gets harder and harder to imagine leaving you behind. It’s not about enchantment or seduction or anything as light as that. It is more like being held captive. It’s powerful and uncomfortable and gets worse all the time.” She couldn’t hear what he was saying. She just knew that her lover thought she was plain.

But as Caroline she could put these two irrefutable facts together, plain and woman. It meant she could move somewhere new and go to the store or apply for a job and people wouldn’t feel threatened or aroused. She knew she could go unnoticed. She could not recall her own face if she wasn’t staring in a mirror. This smeary obscurity that had caused her pain her whole life became an asset now, her anonymity her saving attribute. Her looks had finally found their perfect context as a fugitive. Born to it by being chronically forgettable. (Which was also part of how she got in this position in the first place. Walking slowly, half smile on her face, clutching an innocuous purse, or a package, or a suitcase. Would anyone bother to stop such a person?)

Caroline did possess other assets as well. She could cook. She had worked in her father’s restaurant her entire youth. She could walk into a kitchen with a nearly bare pantry and create chilis and pastas and stews. This made her eminently employable. Restaurants hired people off the books. No legitimate Social Security number required. No references. No one would suspect this bland, wan woman was anything but harmless and ordinary. Because, despite the circumstances that had brought her here, she knew herself finally to be harmless and ordinary.

By the third evening in the motel she didn’t feel nearly as fear-struck. She even had an hour or two of giddy confidence. She was almost ready. Almost.

She imagined in future years there would be time to go over the series of events that led to the one event that inevitably led to the motel room. It felt like that, a whoosh of history, the somersault of dialectic rather than the firm step of will. The weight of centuries of history counterlevered against what, one person’s action? Just in the planning they knew where it would lead. Contingencies are never really contingencies but blueprints. Probabilities became certainties. She knew she would comb over how she came to be involved with cells and plans and people who believed in the inevitable and absolute. Someday she would explain her intentions to someone, at least to herself. And the event, which she could not think about, not yet, the event that she could not even name, she referred to in her thoughts as then, or the thing, or it . But surely in years to come she would think about it, over and over again, especially the part where Mary became Freya became Caroline.

What else?

She brushed her teeth. She ate more peanut butter and bread. She wished for a joint but settled for a beer bought at the store across the street. She exited briefly the afternoon of the third day, wearing large sunglasses and a scarf. She trembled in the fluorescence of the convenience store and hurried to pick up some juice, some beer, the paper. The Lincoln Journal Star . Front page, lower left quarter, a picture of Bobby Desoto. Just pay and leave. She stumbled back across the highway to her mustard-colored motel room. She read as she walked.

She opened the paper to the inside report and felt the fear come crashing back, making her stumble. She started to cry — noisy, hiccuped sobs and gulps as she closed the door behind her, staring at the lines of type. She learned that the group had been identified, although only one had been caught, Tamsin. She was the youngest and weakest. They must have gotten the names from her, just as Bobby suspected they probably would. (Behind her back he used to refer to Tamsin as M.L.C. — Most Likely to Crack.) But Tamsin didn’t really know the details of the various underground plans. The authorities were looking, but they had few leads. Nevertheless, contact anytime soon with Bobby was definitely out. She already knew that would probably be the case, but she cried anyway.

She drank three beers in a row watching TV shows about regular people. She sniffed as her nose ran. She went over everything again and again. Had she already made mistakes?

Her motel room was outside the train station just south of Lincoln, Nebraska, which was practically the dead center of the country. She wondered — she stared at Ironside and then turned the channel to Owen Marshall, and then to a commercial for denture glue — if a lot of fugitives headed for the dead center of the country, stopping there to make a plan of where to go next. Maybe this was fugitive central, a magnet.

PoliGrip. Eat like a man.

Polaroid. Land Camera. SX-70. Almost part of you.