Dana Spiotta: Eat the Document

Right after he finished his first real conversation with Miranda, he held a meeting of the Church of the Latter Day Drop Society, which was his neo-yippie, post-situationist group, with an open-ended policy to let anyone who happened to be in the shop participate. A whopping eight kids straggled in. He noticed Miranda stuck around as he put his boxes of books away and cleared the table for the meeting. After her one moment of chastising Nash for his soft drink choice, she didn’t speak but seemed to be pensively listening.

She sat in the farthest seat in the back, in the corner, blowing on her chai tea, legs crossed. Her laceless sneakers had thick white rubber soles, on which she had written slogans and drawn graffiti-style pictures with a black marker. It struck him as sweet, the youthful gesture of writing on your shoes. A strange form of self-expression similar to writing on your school binder: half-motivated by declaring your difference to the world (an important thing) and half-motivated by a desperate enslavement to what other people thought of you (the terrifying thrall to presentation that intensified everything crappy about being an adolescent). She charmed and distracted him with her shoes, and he actually tried to decipher the slogans, which was impossible.

She began coming in most days for her tea. Nash also noticed her on the street one afternoon walking arm in arm with Sissy. They smiled at him and waved, and then did that thing that young women do — fall about in giggles as soon as you wave back, as if you disappeared after the moment passed and they were now alone, critiquing it. She turned up again the following week at another of his groups, the Kill the Street Puppets Project, an antipuppet guerrilla theater group. That got a big crowd, as many people seemed to have a secret aversion to papier-mâché and chicken wire. She sat again in the corner, her limbs double-crossed, her face stern and serious, and earnestly took notes. It wasn’t until her third week of attending his group meetings that she finally spoke up. This was during the Brand and Logo Devaluation Front meeting.

She wanted to hijack labels on Nike shirts.

“We could alter them to indicate that they were made in China under appalling conditions. Make it look exactly like a Nike label, but instead of saying one hundred percent cotton, it says made from sixty percent Chinese prison labor, forty percent child labor.”

“Yeah, and I think product tampering is like a major felony,” said a guy in a slightly unraveled, fuzzy alpaca vintage sweater worn with an oversized trench coat. He had on a hand-knit cap and never sat or removed his hands from his coat pockets, as if to say, “I’m not really here,” or “I am almost not here, I’m just going to stay long enough to try to make everyone not want to do anything.”

Miranda furrowed her brow and gnawed at the edge of her fingernail. She had the raw, swollen nail beds of a chronic biter. It was always these self-devouring types who ended up here, hating Nike. (Nike, like Starbucks, originated in the Northwest and then exploded in horrendous global ubiquity. The local kid culture obsessively focused on these formerly local corporations. They had a sense of entitlement when it came to making them targets, even as they still loved and desired the products on some level, too. That love seemed to increase their desire to undo the corporations that made them. It used to be you had to make munitions to piss people off. Now it was enough to be large, global and successful. That made it a more radical, systematic critique, Nash thought. And more futile, naturally.) Nash figured there were worse ways for these kids to expend their anger and energy. Way worse ways. So he listened to them rant and plot against Nike, and it was good.

Nash’s head throbbed; he couldn’t sleep after the previous night’s late meeting. Despite his fatigue, he caught himself looking around throughout the day for Miranda. He sat at the common table drinking coffee and sorting used books when he saw it happen again. And again it was Davey D. Again it was one of those extreme magazines sealed in plastic. It couldn’t have been more than three weeks since the previous incident. Nash sat with clipboard and pen, surrounded by stacks of old books. He sneezed the whole time he priced the used books. These were books donated to them or acquired at estate sales or at flea markets. Many of them were mildewed, all of them were dusty. Sometimes it seemed to him the more unusual or valuable the book was, the more likely it would have acquired the stench of decay. He usually quarantined the bad ones. They infected the good ones. But he didn’t throw them out. The main reason the mildew grew there in the first place was because the books were neglected — unread, uncracked even, for years. Admittedly many of these books were from small, do-it-yourself-type presses: cheap, disposable productions with high-acid paper that began decaying right from the get-go. There really wasn’t a remedy for the mildew — he would end up putting those books in the free bin in front of the store.

Davey D.’s first theft was not particularly a blow, but its repetition, and the fact that it was right in front of him again, made it unusually upsetting. He didn’t even want to carry these types of magazines, but some of the kids loved that crap — the semi-retarded, tiny subversion of extreme, physically expert but mentally unchallenging subcultures. He called it brat refusal, that skate-rat rebelliousness, but it was still alternative in some way, it still had the energy of resistance. And he was not convinced that these compromises were a bad thing, not convinced that the thinnest veneer of rebellion wasn’t still preferable to none at all.

Nash’s feelings, then, were complicated when he witnessed this repeated, petty theft: D.D.’s person as crypto rich, the object as base, and the shamelessness of the grab right in front of him. Nash also knew he would just suck it up and absorb the loss. Henry would tolerate it, he would make it up some other way. Because Nash would rather jeopardize the existence of the whole enterprise than bust this kid. Not because he didn’t like confrontation but because he absolutely refused to be a cop of any kind. It really would be the last thing he would ever do. He was certain that the tiniest choices altered the world as significantly as larger choices. It was through accumulation that people gradually became unrecognizable to themselves. He would sacrifice a lot not to become an enforcer.

He watched as Davey D. walked out the door with no hesitation, just as before.

Nash returned to his stack of books. His skin itched. Itching always coincided with his being watched — he could feel scrutiny like a rash. He realized that this whole theft drama had been witnessed by one of the other kids.

Josh Marshall stood by the table and nodded in his direction. Nash recognized him. He stood out because he didn’t have the customary appointments of the Prairie Fire crowd. He wore clean, well-pressed clothes. Short, neatly combed hair. He bought interesting books. Nash couldn’t recall which ones exactly, but he remembered thinking he was an unusual kid.

Nash waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. Instead he examined the top book on the stack. It was a cheap small-press paperback of Alexander Berkman’s prison memoirs, essays and collected letters with no introduction, tiny Garamond type and thin, newsprintlike paper. And it was rancid with mildew. Josh picked it up and looked at the back pages.

“Revolutionist first, human afterwards,” Josh said. He used his thumb to slowly fan the pages of the book.

“I think he revised that position by like page ten,” Nash said.

“I hate books without indexes,” Josh said.

“It’s an old edition. I have a newer edition on the shelves that has an index. And explanatory footnotes. And an introduction—”