Dana Spiotta: Eat the Document

D-Con. House and garden spray. Against bugs.

She wondered if her every thought would be predictable, the same things people always thought in these circumstances, and if she would give herself away without even realizing it. She doubted, actually, that anyone else would follow her Nebraska strategy. Logic would say try to get over the border, to Canada or Mexico. Most would move to the perimeter. That was what they would be looking for.

What else?

She, Caroline, didn’t have siblings, and her parents died in a car wreck years ago. She felt superstitious about writing that down. As if it would curse her poor parents somehow, or undo her younger sister.

For the first couple of years, Caroline wouldn’t be able to resist the occasional phone call to her mother. She knew this was dangerous. She knew this was a big, stupid risk. She knew the FBI, COINTELPRO, the police, all of them, expected this and had tapped the phones of all her relatives and friends. If there was anything Bobby had hammered into her, it was the consequences of involving other people. Anyone she told the truth to could be charged with harboring a fugitive. No contact of any kind could occur. She only hoped that somehow her family understood this. That she was protecting them. Caroline would talk herself out of it as many times as she could, and then she would call from a phone booth. She would wait until her father or mother picked up the phone. She would say nothing. She would listen to the sound of her mother’s voice saying hello, and then her mother getting annoyed and repeating that word, hello, in an urgent way. Then Caroline would hang up and start crying. Or continue crying, as that had already started when her finger first rotated the dial on the phone. She would go as long as she could and then call again, and swear it was the last time, until a few months went by and she couldn’t resist calling once more.

And?

Choose a California Social Security number, start with 568 or 546. The next two digits relate to your age. Always even numbered.

She removed the towel from her wet hair. She opened the tiny frosted window in the bathroom to let the hot, steamy air escape. She took the towel and wiped the mirror clear. In the seconds before it fogged again, she glimpsed her newly blond hair. It was a daffodil yellow blond, not the ash promised on the box. The side-parted, sophisticated and liberated woman on the L’Oréal box. From the Champagne Blonde series. Honestly. But it didn’t matter. She wouldn’t feel liberated by her blond hair whether it was egg-yolk yellow or a pale, early-summer corn-silk flaxen. She didn’t feel any relief in discarding her old look, or in no longer having to be the woman she was. She only felt an unnamed dread that had more to do with loss than capture. What do you discover when you remove all the variables? That you are the sum of your experiences and vital statistics? That you are you no matter what your name or whether people expect different things of you? She wanted to feel the joy of no one urging her to go to graduate school, or to get married, or even to give it all up for the movement. To get to be anyone is a rebirth, isn’t it? But she couldn’t be anyone, she got to be — had to be — anyone but who she was. In retreat and in hiding. She looked at herself, and she saw the same whispery, alone person she had been her whole life, more unlikely than ever to feel at home anywhere. And the dyed hair made her complexion more sallow. She looked not monochromatic but subchromatic. A pallid suggestion of a person.

The very last time she would call home was on her mother’s birthday, March 9, 1975. Twenty-nine months, three weeks and two days after she first went underground. She called, and her mother answered the phone. She listened as her mother said Hello? and waited, not hanging up, because she couldn’t, not just yet, and her mother said, “Mary, is that you? Mary?” with a plaintive, quiet voice. She instantly pushed the receiver button to disconnect, still pressing her ear to the handset. She could hear her breath, feel her heart dropping to her stomach, and her knees actually buckling at the sound of her mother saying her name. To her. She leaned against the phone booth and then felt a contraction and a heave as coffee-tinged bile rose up her throat and back down. She knew then she couldn’t call again, ever. Never, ever, never.

She had written it all down, once, on the ripped-out piece of spiral notebook paper. Her name, her history, the members of her family. Where Caroline Sherman had spent every year of her twenty-two years. When she was done, she tore the paper into shreds over the wastebasket. Then she fished the shreds out of the basket and lit them one by one in the yellow glass ashtray. She had it all memorized. She had all the details already in her head if not exactly in her heart.

SHE, MY MOTHER, apparently walked by my open bedroom door as I was blaring “Our Prayer.” I’d just gotten my hands on the Beach Boys’ three-disc Smile bootleg — you know, the kind of bootleg where there are like ten versions of the same song in a row? All these versions are usually just alternate takes that vary only slightly from the other versions. Say, for instance, on this take Brian stops singing two bars from the end. Or the harmonies get muddled slightly. Or somebody says, “One, two, three, four,” at the beginning in a soft, defeated, boyish voice. So these aren’t versions per se, these are screwups.

There are plenty of other bootlegs featuring actual different versions of Beach Boys songs: they occasionally have an extra verse, or a different person singing lead. Or different harmonies, different arrangements. Sometimes completely different lyrics. What my extended-box-set-bootleg packaging of Smile offers though is almost exclusively alternate takes. Ten, fifteen, twenty takes that are nearly identical to each other. They have already worked out how it is going to go, exactly how it will sound, and the takes are all about executing it. Now, you might ask, why the hell does someone want to listen to all that? And in truth, when I realized what I had bought (ninety dollars, no less), at first I was disappointed. But, and this is a big but, there is something amazing about hearing the takes. It is as if you are in the recording studio when they made this album. You are there with all the failures, the intense perfectionism, the frustration of trying to realize in the world the sounds you hear in your head. Sometimes they abruptly stop after someone says “cut” because they lost it, it didn’t break their hearts enough, they just couldn’t feel it in the right places. Or someone starts laughing, or says, suddenly, “Could you hear me on that?” What happens is you jump to a new level in your obsession where even the most arcane details become fascinating. You follow a course of minutiae and repetition, and you find yourself utterly enthralled. Listening deeply to this kind of music is mesmerizing in itself; the same song ten times in a row is like a meditation or a prayer. So it is quite apt to listen to the song “Our Prayer” in this manner. I’m on listen number three of the full ten versions, at about version seven, and I am peaking — my desire to listen is being satisfied but hasn’t been entirely fulfilled, fatigue hasn’t crept in yet, I still yearn for more, and it is a premium experience at this point, the blast of wall-to-wall harmonies, five-part, singing no words but just beautiful, celestial ahhs, the voices soaring, pure instruments of sound. Really, the Beach Boys at their acid choir best.

She, my mother, stopped by my door, which, as I said, was open, in itself a very unusual thing. I must have just returned from the kitchen or the bathroom and not yet closed the door. Maybe I was so into the music and wanted so much to be back next to it that I didn’t even notice the door. I think actually I had a sandwich and a soda in my hands and I was arranging them on my desk, and that’s why I hadn’t closed the door yet. I noticed her leaning slightly against the doorjamb. I thought perhaps she mistook the open door as some sort of invitation. But then I noticed this tiny smile creeping across her lips, and how she wasn’t really looking at me, and then I realized she was listening to the music, that was why she was standing there.