Dana Spiotta - Eat the Document

For example:

Last night she said something that struck me as odd. She and I were watching the news together. I got bored and went to my room. I scratched out a school essay in about thirty minutes. It’s all so easy, it is just a joke. Then I went online to the Cabin Essence site, which is where I find my bootlegs. I was deep in conversation with a guy in Alabama who posted a bunch of stuff about a tape of the complete “Good Vibrations” sessions (which seems to me a song of such oddness and complexity that I could spend months parsing it and unpacking it) when I heard a knock at the door. I knew it was my mother, and I shouted at her but she couldn’t hear me because I was playing the music loud. I lowered it and hollered “What?” in an exasperated tone. She didn’t answer but knocked again. I got up and opened the door. She stood there with a pale, slight smile, clutching her sweater sleeves, which are always too long so she plays with them, half-burying her hands in them. It occurs to me she does this deliberately to emphasize how petite, how tiny, how frail she is. As if she can’t buy sweaters in the proper size.

“Yeah?” I said with exaggerated inflection. I did not want to encourage her.

“Jason.”

“What is it, Mom? I’m doing a paper for class.” She nodded and then looked around my room a bit. She doesn’t get to come in very often. I keep it clean, and she stays out, at least I think she does. I turned the music way down. I didn’t want to spark any recovered memories about her glorious old days hanging out with Dennis Wilson.

“What is it about?”

“What?”

“Your paper for class.”

I shrugged. I didn’t know where this was going. I don’t have much patience for her these days. I want her to stay out of my way, ask no questions. She doesn’t understand that this is just the way it goes for mothers and sons in these years. It’s not her, it is just the not-her of her that I want, I want nothing from her except for her not to ask me things or stand in my doorway with a pale, sad look on her face, clutching at her sweater sleeves.

“Don’t you have a class tonight?” I said. She teaches her adult cooking classes. She tutors illiterate adults. She mentors underprivileged children. It is not like she has nothing to do but talk to me. She nodded.

“I made you some dinner, it’s in the fridge.” She just stood there. I gave up.

“It’s about Alger Hiss, HUAC, that stuff.”

“That’s great,” she said. “That’s very interesting.”

Oh, Christ, I shouldn’t have said anything, but she wanted something, and I just didn’t have the heart to say nothing. Now she was going to want more.

“So what do you think?” she said.

“About what?” I asked.

“Did he do it?”

“Did Hiss do it?” I said.

She nodded.

“Of course Hiss did it. No one disputes that anymore.”

“It’s generally known, you’re saying.”

“He did it all right.”

“Well, thank God that’s cleared up. All this time I’ve been wondering.” She said this earnestly, and there was a pause, and then she began to laugh. And I laughed. Which was surprising. She finally turned to leave. Then she stopped and looked back at me.

“Why, though?”

“Why what?” I asked.

“Why would Hiss do it?”

“Who knows? He certainly didn’t make any money from it. I guess because he believed it was the right thing to do.”

“So why are you writing about the Hiss case, it being generally known and all?” She was quite serious again, not laughing. I looked at her, and I don’t know why I said this, but I did.

“I’m curious about him. The fact that he spied isn’t so remarkable. Or even that he was in a position to lose so much privilege. I find that sort of admirable if misguided. What I find amazing is how he lied his entire life. How well he lied. If it wasn’t for the facts, it would be quite convincing. How does a person manage to not crack his entire life? Not even on his deathbed?”

She stood there, and she looked right at me, an open-eyed look.

“I mean if something is worth doing, shouldn’t you admit doing it? Shouldn’t you take responsibility for your actions?”

She looked a bit startled. “Maybe other people would suffer if he confessed it,” she said.

“Maybe. Or maybe he regretted it.”

“That’s very possible.”

“Or maybe he was a coward,” I said.

And then it passed, she was backing up a bit, then moving down the hall.

“I made some chicken quesadillas. You just have to heat them up.”

“That’s great, thanks.”

She turned away. But I stayed in my doorway a moment more.

“I wonder, you know, about whether his wife knew the truth. Or his friends.”

She stopped again and looked at me. “And what conclusion have you come to?” she asked.

“No one knew the truth. He didn’t even know anymore, maybe. To live that long with it, you must have to convince yourself it never really happened. Don’t you think?”

She shook her head and shrugged. She looked weary and old and far away. “I don’t know,” she finally said. We were weirdly awkward, not our usual awkward. She said, “You’re a bright kid, aren’t you?”

My mother is a stranger. And she is strange. I am not sure at all what she thinks or feels about anything. And it’s funny because she should be wondering about me, not the other way around. I should be thinking about rock-and-roll and girls and drugs. Not why she gets so fuzzy and confused sometimes.

I retreated to Gage’s house. He was on some kind of one-night George Clinton — Funkadelic kick. Which meant we had to listen also to P-Funk All Stars and Parliament, and every tributary that leads to and from these bands. What other albums they were session musicians on, what songs of theirs were covered by other people. He put on Maggot Brain from 1971, an admittedly awesome album. The cover alone — an Afroed black-power chick screaming and buried up to her neck in sand. And smokin’ psychedelic funk, very heavy and druggy sounding, with a swell of flange and fuzz at the edges. It had a creepy menace about it still, particularly a drop-dead sad and lovely extended guitar solo on the first song. Gage naturally whipped out a joint. I can’t smoke, it doesn’t make me feel good. It makes me confused and overly deliberate. But I smoked anyhow, and the music became claustrophobic and frightening.

“You know what this music sounds like?” Gage said.

“What?”

“It sounds like his mother just died.”

I looked sideways at Gage. What did he mean by that? What was his point? The wail of guitar got longer, more extended and further from the melody. Did it go on forever? Could it please just return? It was all too dark for me, so I begged off and went back to my place to listen to Pet Sounds (the original mono version on vinyl). I put on the old-fashioned headphones with the oversized foam-filled ear cushions and lay on the floor. And I let the Beach Boys’ choir voices wash under and over me until I was in a gloriously unfractured universe of exquisite, naïve beauty.

Sometimes I think I am in love with my own youth. I do not want to go forward, I always want to be carelessly lost in this music. I never want to get sick of it, and I never, ever, want to outgrow this or anything. I certainly don’t need to know anything more about her.

NASH HADN’T seen Miranda in several months. He had heard rumors that Miranda was moving east with Josh, or had already moved east. She finally resurfaced for a meeting of the Last Wave Cinema Collective, one of Prairie Fire’s underground art and ecto-provo groups. Nash didn’t organize the group, but he let the participants show their films and collect what they could at the door. The unfortunate thing, in Nash’s view, was how lousy most of the work ended up being, how boring: painfully didactic and too often satiric in the most shallow way — just the sort of satire that reinforced oppressive American cultural hegemony rather than challenging it. Nash figured bad films, particularly bad attempts at political or subversive statements, were so unappealing they were not just sad and depressing but counter-revolutionary, reactionary, practically on the payroll of status quo America. He gave no — absolutely no — credit for “heart in right place” or “attempting with limited resources.” He felt insulted by lousy films.