Dana Spiotta - Eat the Document

They ate breakfast in silence. Caroline tried not to panic, and then she gave up.

“Look, Berry, what I told you last night, we should never, ever speak of it, no matter what.” They sat across from each other in a diner booth, and although no one else was anywhere near them, Caroline spoke in an angry whisper.

“He made you do it, didn’t he? Men are always getting caught up in violence,” Berry said. She poured syrup over a mound of pancakes and butter.

Caroline took a deep breath. And then, from somewhere it came, this feeling she had not had since before she went underground. She felt outrage and anger, a chemical burn.

“That’s not it, not by a long shot. I’ll tell you once. One time. Then no more questions, right?” Caroline stared into Berry’s face.

Berry stopped eating.

“It wasn’t his idea, it was my idea.” She paused, pleased for a second at saying it. She wished she could leave it at that, and she already felt weary of trying to explain herself. But she continued. “I’d had enough of demonstrating against the war. We’d all had our fill of it — years of it. It changed nothing. I wanted to actively oppose. Not protest, some form of symbolic speech or gesture. We wanted tangible, unequivocal action. It was not necessarily the right tactic. I will say this, though, I was sure it was right at the time. I had to do something, I had to put myself at risk, personally. I had to meet the enormity of what they were doing with something equal to it. There was no end. They were sending troops home but with such bad faith; they knew that would placate the antiwar movement, but then they stepped up the bombing. They had no intention of not continuing. Napalm, someone makes that, you know? Someone sits in an R and D lab and thinks, Let’s make it burn, but hey, let’s add plastic so it will also stick. But look, they just jump in the water, so let’s add phosphorus so it burns underwater, burns through to bone. So people on the board of Dow or Monsanto or GE decide that this is a good way to make money, and they are so removed from the consequences. These men are at such remove they could help prolong it, a year, two years, and is it right that that should cost them nothing? We are invisible to them. How smug they were, ignoring us. I wanted them to feel some consequence, pay some price for the terrible things they did for pride or power or profit.”

“Okay, I know.”

“And it wasn’t intended to be violent. It was just destructive. Of stuff. For a purpose. Like the Berrigan brothers said, some property doesn’t have a right to exist.”

Berry began to cry over her pancakes and syrup, clutching her fork.

“Intentions do matter. They make all the difference…”

Caroline felt the words fail her, and her face felt hot, and then she realized she was crying too.

“Why are you crying?” Caroline said, wiping at her eyes.

“It was a brave thing, honestly, I think it was a brave thing,” Berry said.

“It doesn’t matter what you think. I didn’t do it for you.” Caroline still felt angry at her, which made no sense. Then she inhaled and made herself look placidly at Berry. “I’m so sorry you have to know. I shouldn’t have told you.”

“I can’t really believe it, to be honest with you. It hasn’t sunk in, you know, that you’re this entirely other person than what I thought.” Berry reached her hand across the table and touched Caroline’s arm. “But I think I understand, though. Really. Look at the bright side, at least the president is getting his now. He’s stepped on his own cock, hasn’t he? The war’s ending, and now he’s going down too.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t feel the way you thought it would, does it?” Caroline said. She pulled her hand out from under Berry’s. “It just feels like everything has gone to shit.”

They hitchhiked back to Hepatitis Hill. They didn’t, in fact, speak of it again, nor incidentally did they speak of where “they” would be going next.

Caroline knew that she would have to leave soon. She knew that the FBI would get to the communes, and they already knew her alias probably. She would have to leave in the night, and go somewhere far away and change her name again. And when the FBI came, maybe Berry would talk or maybe she wouldn’t. But Caroline would be long gone by then.

Caroline hid in the woods and headed for the highway as soon as she saw them. She kept some emergency money for just this instance. Because from the minute she spoke to Berry she knew it would happen, and sooner rather than later. She saw the men in their suits, the sedan. She did not know if Berry would tell them anything. Berry would either betray her or suffer. And Caroline would not stick around to find out. She walked with speed past trees and rocks and old broken fences. She bushwhacked until she found a road, and then she looked for a ride.

The day had begun the same as many other days. She woke up in the common house at dawn. She went outside to start laundry duty, which she liked. The morning was cold and clean — the air smelled sweet with burning wood. Already people were up and cooking. She grabbed a pile of towels to fold and sat on a stone in the early morning sun. She watched the camp come to life from a distance. She could see, through the tree branches and the red and yellow leaves, the women from the tech-nos coming down the hill in their wimples and robes like medieval nuns. They were theatrical in their reinvention. Reinvention as choice, as pride.

Watching them, Caroline realized her time was over. Before the feds showed up, before the sedan, she felt it in her bones. Living in the woods made you believe in intuition. She could never be a carefree reinventor. She lived more like a woman in a doomed affair. As days, then weeks and months eventually went by, the accumulation of time made things not deeper, or better, or safer, but more dangerous, more doomed. Eventually the day would come when consecutive events could not help but be traced, ruminated upon, dwelt upon, all leading to her, or to him. One weak link, from one weak moment. An overlooked detail, or a mistakenly trusted person — Mel, say, or Berry. All things led to her because all things led to her . The truth wanted to be told; this was the force of facts versus will and luck. Facts always win because they are simply always, and they will outlast everything.

She left because she didn’t belong there. These women dreamt of utopia, but what else did they have to do? Caroline had lots of things to do: Run. Hide.

Dusk approached by the time she made it to the road that would eventually get her a hitch to the highways. She felt calm in her escape and didn’t mind waiting for a ride, walking roadside. Another cloudless, cold fall day, the sun setting and throwing long shadows across groomed meadows, specific and detailed near tree trunks and telephone poles, and then stretched out to such abstraction that it took a minute to determine which shadow belonged to which object; the world divided into the bright — sun-facing, gloriously illuminated in gold-brown light — and the shadowed — darkened and indefinite, as murky as the future, and as mysterious. She didn’t get a ride for hours, and she walked through expanses of fields ending in two-block hamlets, the clusters of houses creating swathes of cold darkness across the roadside.

She hadn’t seen them talk to Berry. She didn’t see Berry point at her work station, tears in her eyes. In truth she didn’t even see men in suits, or the dark, late-model sedan. She just felt it and didn’t look back. She disappeared.

She hitchhiked west, and fourteen months after her invention, she would leave Caroline out on the road somewhere and think of another person to be. She was supposed to meet up with Bobby on New Year’s Eve, in L.A. By then she would be someone new. If you don’t hear from me, we’ll meet at the end of next year at the Blue Cantina in Venice Beach . That gave her six weeks or so.