Dana Spiotta - Eat the Document

He wiped his eyes.

“You can’t look at what we did in a vacuum. This immoral war was going on and on. And whatever we did, we thought it would help scare them into ending that war sooner.”

“Yeah, how’d that work out for you? Didn’t that war last like nine years?” Jason said.

“It doesn’t only matter if we succeed in our intentions. It matters what our intentions were. We wanted to do something. There had been years of peaceful efforts. Things escalated. It was an act of desperation.”

Jason nodded.

“You must believe that we never intended to hurt anyone. That was a terrible consequence that we never desired or sought. Which doesn’t excuse it, but maybe it makes it more understandable to you.”

“It must have crossed your mind, the risks you were taking, and not just with your own lives. But that doesn’t even matter to me. Whatever. I mean, I can easily buy that you were foolish enough not to realize how inevitable it was that planting bombs would lead to killing somebody. I just can’t believe you lied to me all these years about who you are.”

“I planned to tell you when you were old enough. When I was ready to turn myself in. The last thing I would ever want is for you to have to keep my secret.”

“You want to turn yourself in? After all these years?” His tone had changed slightly. He sounded surprised.

“I’m so sorry. About all of it. But yes, I plan to turn myself in as soon as possible.”

She gripped her hands in her lap and waited for the withering speech that would come next.

“Did my father even know the truth?”

She shook her head.

“It’s amazing,” he said.

“It sounds amazing. Most of the time it was just everyday. Except no experience was ever one hundred percent what it was. There was always this extra thing, this underlying doom.”

She started to pick up the spilled plate and food. “I’ll clean it,” he said.

When he finished he sat down across from her. She took her pipe out and started to smoke. She held it out to him, and he ignored her offer.

“It was something, though, what you did. You had guts, really, I never would have guessed,” he said.

“It was a huge miscalculation. A huge mistake.”

“At least you did something. What a world that must have been where ordinary people actually did things. Things that affected, however tangentially, history.”

She tried to think of what to say next. But she couldn’t speak. She felt such a huge sense of relief. She felt so grateful to her son. How did she get such a break after everything else? She reached her hand out to touch him.

“Jesus, don’t get carried away.” He shrugged her off. “I haven’t forgiven you for lying my entire life.”

She laughed.

“I’m glad you think that’s funny,” he said.

“No, I just think you’re funny. You really are very funny. I’m not ever funny, am I?”

“Oh yeah. Here’s something that will make you laugh,” he said. He handed her a piece of paper with a phone number on it.

“What is it?”

“Bobby Desoto’s number. His name is Nash Davis, now. In another thrilling twist of fate, he lives not very far from here.”

She clutched the piece of paper. She hadn’t expected this at all.

“How did you find him?”

“I tried different possibilities. Finally I used the acronym from the film collective. There were a few American references to SAFE on the Internet, but one stood out. It was for an anarchy board that posted something for the Prairie Fire bookstore. I investigated this SAFE and discovered it stood for Scratch Artists for Effacement. It is a notorious meta-prankster group that semi doesn’t exist. That just reeked of Desoto to me. This guy Nash Davis organizes events at Prairie Fire. So I called him. Bingo.”

“You really are smart,” she said.

“Don’t get carried away.”

Louise remembered every detail of the day she first met Bobby. He kept filming her at a protest at the draft board. He followed her around until she finally told him to stop. She recognized him. She’d been at a happening where they showed some of his movies. He agreed to stop filming her if she would get some Chinese food with him.

After they ate he took her to the Valence Chemical building downtown. He walked her down the hall, pulling her by the hand. He opened the doors marked “Private.” He was gleeful and fearless as they went from room to room. He also seemed to know where everything was. He pulled her into an empty room full of file cabinets. He glanced at her, opened a couple of drawers and threw several stacks of files in the metal wastebasket. He lit them on fire with his Zippo lighter and pulled her out of the room laughing. He tried another door. It was locked. He looked up and down the hall, then took out a metal tool and jimmied the door open. He pushed her inside and closed the door. It was dark, and he leaned her against the wall and kissed her.

“I’m showing off for you. Aren’t you impressed?”

“Very,” she said. Then he kissed her again. Later that night he would confess that his father was the head of the Research and Development Department at Valence Chemical. He hadn’t told any of his movement friends about his family. His father practically invented (or at least developed) applications for several synthetic polymers: polystyrene and polyvinyl chloride. This was part of a revolution of industrial thermoplastics. Nash’s father pioneered plastics that were used to make stable film stock, long-playing records, PVC piping, water beds and — inevitably — various kinds of munitions: plastic fragmentation mines as well as particularly vicious plasticized gasoline and white phosphorus bombs that made — as they detonated and burned with a relentless, stubborn, chemical stink — the most beautiful, white, elegant-but-brisant smoke trails.

After that, they stayed together every single night until they went underground.

The bar in Belltown had seen a series of better days. It was attached to an old hotel, which way back when had captivated the hip youth of the music scene. They moved on, leaving the bar and hotel to budget European travelers, who then gave way to the single-room-occupancy crowd. Louise waved the cigarette smoke away as she entered. It was still light outside, and this was not the sort of place that worked at all during the day. But it was deserted, and she understood why Bobby had chosen it.

She saw him at a booth in the back. She was shocked to discover that, beyond his looking old and frail, or in spite of it, he was unmistakably Bobby, and she felt the same as she had twenty-eight years earlier: the air felt thin, and her whole metabolism quaked at the sight of him. She closed her eyes at the inner flutter, and it pleased her to feel it, it really did. Then she of course started to cry. Bobby stood up as she approached. He reached for her hand, and she pulled back, out of reach.

After a minute she sat down. Bobby grasped her hand before she had a chance to stop him.

“It’s all right,” he said.

She said nothing, pulled her hand away and pressed both palms to her eyes. She inhaled. She took a paper napkin and pressed it to her face. She raised her hand at the bartender.

“Some bourbon. That one,” she said, pointing to a bottle.

“Two,” Nash said.

“I’m turning myself in,” she said.

Nash drank his bourbon.

“I wanted to let you know. I won’t say anything about you, of course, but I thought I ought to warn you just the same since Jason got in touch with you so recently.”

“I had a feeling you were going to tell me that,” Nash said.

“They may figure it out anyway, but they won’t hear it from me,” she said. She looked away, but she could feel him watching her.