Dana Spiotta - Eat the Document

She stopped at the entrance to the dome. “I’m Jill, by the way. Hill Jill, I watch the perimeter. Come on in and I’ll get you some food.”

“We brought beer.”

“Not allowed.”

Berry looked at Caroline and raised an eyebrow.

“So let’s get it inside and drink it quick,” Jill said.

Hill Jill’s dome was as comfortable and airily spacious inside as an omnitriangulated polyhedral dwelling could be. It had a rose-stained, translucent resin skylight, handmade simple wood furniture and a wood-burning cookstove. There were macramé decorations and many brightly colored yarn god’s eyes strung from the ceiling. The dome apparently also ran on electricity: Jill used a small refrigerator and a state-of-the-art, vinyl-veneer-encased hi-fi stereo system surrounded by stacks of records. Her platform bed was covered in Indian blankets, and an entire “wall” was hugged by a curved bookshelf full of books. Caroline could see books on Eastern religion and the requisite copy of the Whole Earth Catalog . Several panels of scratched and cloudy Plexiglas embedded in the sides of the dome served as the only windows. Through the Plexiglas they could see the hills and woods beyond the trail.

“Nice space in here,” said Caroline.

“I built it myself out of abandoned car parts. Reclaimed from the refuse of industrial society. Everyone builds her own house. You can’t stay if you don’t.”

“Are they all domes like this?”

Hill Jill shrugged and slammed the bottle cap off the beer on the edge of the cookstove.

“Some are. There are your usual Buckminster Fuller dome freaks up here. You can just follow a recipe and build a home out of junk. Put a little resin sealant on the seams, caulk it with tar. Some of us are more elaborate. I’m tied in to the grid with electricity. I used fiberglass insulation, PVC pipe. Plastic sealants. I have a well with running water. But every woman does her own thing.”

“They let you decide, huh?” said Berry.

“Technology will set you free.”

“You could spend all day hauling buckets of water. Or keeping a fire going,” Caroline said, flipping open a beer.

“Exactly. Technology to eliminate drudgery. We are right in the midst of hardscrabble nation, twenty below in winter. I am no primitivist.”

“What’s this community called?” Berry asked. Jill ignored Berry and continued sipping her beer. Berry repeated her question.

Jill glanced at her finally and smirked. “This is Total Bitch Ranch, sister, Full-Tilt Pussy Ridge. This is High Daddy Farm, you dig? Heretic Homestead, Come-Down Campus, Hepatitis Hill.”

“C’mon.”

Jill cocked her head and gave Berry a slow once-over.

“Classified, sorry. Drink up and then we’ll go up to El Dorado.”

Berry started to flip through the LPs leaning in a stack by the stereo. There were several Ohio Players albums that featured cover photos of a black woman with a shaved head and a bored expression in various states of bondage. One of these albums opened to a gatefold of the nearly naked woman in a studded collar wielding a large leather whip.

“What is this?” Berry held up another album using two fingers, as if the record smelled bad. This cover photo showed a black woman buried up to her neck in dirt, her mouth open in a scream, her huge Afro framing her head. Crooked letters spelled out Maggot Brain .

“Well, it isn’t Joni Mitchell, is it?” Hill Jill said, taking the record from her. Jill turned on the stereo and put the needle down. The distorted guitar and funky rhythms of Funkadelic blared out in badass dissonance. A voice intoned cryptic nonsense about the earth mother. But then, slowly, mournfully, from some far-off place, a long, emotional guitar solo sent stingingly beautiful waves of sound into the room. The guitar sound elongated and contracted for second after second. They all sat and listened, and Jill closed her eyes, making it clear she wanted silence and respect for her music. The music evoked an underlying loneliness that at first made Caroline sad and then started creeping her out. It occurred to her that the guitar solo might go on forever. Berry stared at the cover and killed another beer. At long last the guitar resolved itself back into a sort of melody and the track ended, the whole thing segueing seamlessly into some sexed-up, dark funk.

After they finished three more beers, Jill decided it was time to go, and they started the walk from the perimeter toward what was called the common house. Along the way, Caroline saw dwellings of various and unusual construction. None of them was in sight distance of any other. Sometimes this meant artful placement of shrubberies and ditches. Other times it meant long walks between paths. Some of the dwellings were like Jill’s, variations on dome construction, multiseamed hemispheres. One was a log cabin, rough hewn. There were adobe, cavelike buildings; simple, flimsy thatched huts; rammed-earth-brick houses covered in plaster; even a clapboard saltbox painted white like something from a Christmas card. There were pole-construction, barnlike, prefab homes, gnome-type tree houses, and straw-bale-earth igloos. At each one, artful touches seemed to be added for beauty or whimsy: stained glass set in plastered walls, leaking, unfinished. Mosaic patterns made in rough masonry. One even had turrets and minarets. Another had an actual moat. Caroline had heard about communes like this, seen the pictures in magazines. Up on the hill she saw other dwellings built into the earth, some of them jutting oddly to accommodate trees or boulders. These houses were like submarines, or sci-fi movies. Two distinct categories could be discerned despite all the various details: either simple modest shelters, such as tepees, corrugated-tin sheds and mud huts; or high-tech conceptual houses with recycled industrial waste, pod rooms, pressed plastic and synthetic particleboard construction.

“That one over there is Hesperides’ house. It is all found refuge, rescued and liberated materials from abandoned factories in Utica and old farmhouses along the hills. She calls it Cake Corners. She’s part of the tech-yeses, like me. Over on the other side you have the tech-nos. They are strictly no running water or electricity. Self-consciously primitive, Rousseauian idealists. They cook and wash in one common space and share everything.”

“Sounds groovy to me,” Berry said.

“Yeah, some of us did that scene before and learned our lesson. That’s why we call it Hepatitis Hill. Me, Mother G and some of the others are followers of Hygeia.”

Both women just looked blankly at Jill.

“You know — running water, clean flush toilets, septic tanks and hot showers.”

“Oh yeah, right on.” Caroline smiled. Berry shrugged.

“Do you move to the rural sect because you believe in the perfectibility of human interaction? Or is it an escape, an expression of deep misanthropy?” Right away Mother Goose started giving them her set-piece commune rap. She had met them at the path and was leading them to the common house. Berry squeezed Caroline’s arm when she saw where they were headed. A huge clapboard building, painted brown-purple with brightest pink detailing. It was a simple rectangle shape with a gambrel roof and a perfectly intact stone foundation. Each window contained twelve small panes of old glass above and below each sash.

“It was built in the 1840s by two renegade New Harmon Community women. Really. Not purple originally. White, of course. And built to imitate the original Shaker buildings of the 1790s. You’ve heard of it, New Harmon Community? They named the local town after it. This land has a history of radical alternative community. Christian extremists who thought private property was the root of all evil. We are talking complex marriage, total communal and shared living, including the raising of children. There is even an archive of their papers and journals at the town library. The rednecks that run the town have no clue what New Harmon Community was — if they knew, they’d probably change the name.”