by Dana Spiotta
Agit Pop
MIRANDA EXPECTED August 5 (the date of major tests every year, ostensibly because it was the anniversary of some infamous Seattle Wobbly action in the 1920s) to be a focus for all the actions Nash’s groups discussed. The day came and went, with lots of groups participating, but none of Nash’s did anything. And nothing was said about it. Labor Day weekend was also full of various tests and actions. Again, nothing from Nash’s groups and nothing said about it. By the next planning meeting, this one of the Sovereign Nation of Mystic Diggers and Levelers, it finally dawned on Miranda what Nash was really up to. His groups had no intention of executing any of it. None of them. Not the Barcode Remixers. (They made fake bar code stickers that would replace existing ones. Everything rang up at five or ten cents. This was strictly for the chain, nonunion supermarkets.) Not the New American Provos (inspired by the antiwork Dutch provos, they got jobs at Wal-Mart and then executed ad hoc sabotages). Not the Radical Juxtaposeurs (they rented mainstream films from Blockbuster and dubbed fake commercials onto the beginnings of the tapes to imply dislocated, ominous, disturbing things). The same weird misfits, week after week, with different names and new ideas, new actions, long discussions of smart-ass tactics and tests. But nothing ever acted on. Of course: para-activists, not actually acting but running beside. No one ever said it, you would never know unless you had gone to meetings and paid attention. But it sort of made sense: he always said the actions were for their benefit, not to educate or humiliate the public, even the most evil of corporate bureaucrats. The actions were about keeping their own resistance vital. Direct action to keep you from being absorbed and destroyed. To remind you of what was what. Nash, she realized, had no plans to save the world, or enlighten people or change anything. She was both appalled and impressed, and she couldn’t wait until the day’s meetings were finished and she could talk to him. She wanted to let him know she’d figured it out.
“Want one?” he said, after everyone left. He held up a twenty-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola, its plastic hourglass shape in imitation of or homage to the old eight-ounce glass bottles.
“Once,” she said, “I had this conversation with my elementary school soccer coach.”
“Where was this?” he asked.
“Bellevue. Just on the other side of the lake. We had a great game, and the coach took us out for pizza after. Even in our pretty, suburban, tree-lined town, there was a desperate-looking man outside the pizzeria asking for money.”
“Bellevue, Woodinville, Avondale. Where do they get these names? I mean honestly, Bellevue, who are they fooling with that?” Nash started to get up. Miranda followed.
“We all walked by him, already knowing somehow to ignore him, like how old are you when you learn this? Do any of us even remember when we learned this? So we were stuffing our faces with that doughy pizza and talking about the game.” As soon as they were outside Miranda pulled out one of Sissy’s hash-laced Marlboros.
“I don’t believe you,” Nash said, pointing at the Marlboro package. She shrugged and inhaled.
“It’s more subversive than capitulation or straight opposition to have deliberate, conscious contradictions,” she said.
“Of course, how could I think otherwise?” he said.
Miranda wasn’t flirting, but she did like the way older men (she assumed it was a function of age, even though she had no experience with any other older men in this context) found her weaknesses somehow endearing. And someone like Nash could appreciate her ability to run his game right back at him, to underline his most treasured vanities. He could appreciate the rare form of attention that it indicated; she listened carefully to everything he said to her. After all, what was the point of any of it unless someone paid attention?
“We headed back to the van and walked past the guy lying outside. No one looked at him, and it was even worse because we were all jolly and overfull,” Miranda said.
“You, Miranda, run back and give him your allowance.” Miranda stared at Nash for a long time. He crossed his arms and smiled at her.
“Look, I only smoke hash-lined cigarettes that I get for free or steal.”
“And you realized then and there that you, and you alone, were different, special even. Yes, you, Joan, would save France from the English.”
“And then I only smoke them around people like you, who are so bothered by what other people do.” And she smiled back, but she felt stung and didn’t want to talk to him anymore. She didn’t tell him about how she sat in the van the whole ride from the pizzeria staring out the window, ignoring her teammates. She stared at the big houses set back from the road and remembered when her father drove her family by the public housing projects in the city, and how the people loitering outside glanced at her through her car window, and she looked away.
Miranda sat silently in the back of the bus and listened to the singsong voices of the other girls. The lilt of their young, carefree voices. Finally, she couldn’t help it, and she blurted out, “How can you be happy when there are people with no homes and no food? How?” There was a momentary silence. Then one of the other girls started giggling. And then another girl laughed.
“You have to be an idiot,” Miranda said with a righteous hiss at the girl.
“Well, I must be a complete idiot, because I am hap-hap-happy!” Giggle. Heh, heh. Miranda felt her face get red and hot tears start.
When they got back to school, Mr. Jameson, the soccer coach, asked her to wait a minute. She nodded and wiped her nose. He went past the seat she was in and sat across the aisle from her. He turned to her with a serious frown from which he pressed a tight smile.
“Miranda, you have to understand—” he said. She fixed her gaze on him. She really wanted to understand.
“There are people who are born into this world Indian chiefs and people who are born Indian braves. That’s just the way it is. And that is the way it will always be. Your not enjoying your life won’t help change that. It will just make you unhappy.”
That was his answer; he actually said that to her, and she knew right away that it was a lie. Everyone knows what’s true: you make the world a better place than you found it or you make it worse. Anyone who tells you that isn’t so is just making an excuse for his own inaction. At twelve she vowed to herself never to feel comfortable in the face of things obviously unfair and not right.
Miranda walked away from the bookstore toward the Black House wishing she had stayed and continued talking to Nash. She wished she hadn’t been so sensitive and hadn’t said good night and left. She wanted to talk about the soccer coach and what he had said. And what she really wanted to tell Nash. She’d figured it out, she finally got the joke: The Cult of Lasting Material Invasion, as it was called in this week’s flyer, didn’t ever do any of its actions. Or, another way of putting it, its actions were the discussion and planning of actions. This was a conceptual direct-action group, and no one ever spoke of it—you figured it out or you didn’t.
She wanted to tell him that she’d figured out his para-activist stance and it wasn’t good enough. Not nearly. That it was just another kind of lie. And that’s not all she wanted to tell him. See, it wasn’t just the hash Marlboros. She sometimes ate hamburgers from McDonald’s. She was indeed the one to take big, luxurious wads of toilet paper and inches of Kleenex at a time. It got even worse. When no one was looking, she sometimes threw stuff in the garbage. Newspapers and glass bottles. Easily recyclable stuff. Right in the garbage. Shoved it down so it was buried. Even her mother didn’t throw that stuff in the garbage. Because she couldn’t help it, she just did it and felt guilty about it. That was part of why she talked to Nash in the first place. Because she saw him there, at the meetings, drinking a Coca-Cola.
And finally she wanted to tell him that the world offered horrendous terms, a terrible, huge price was paid in actual suffering, and if you didn’t try to change that or mitigate that, your life was indefensible, wasn’t it? And if he was being clever, or cynical, in the face of that, w
ell, it was wrong. And if she was overly righteous and simpleminded about things, then so what? And maybe she wanted to say something else, but she didn’t even know what that was yet.
Loaded
HENRY SAT through one of Nash’s meetings and then lingered after all the kids left. Miranda wasn’t in, and Nash realized he had spent the evening wondering why. He had been waiting to talk to her all day. It had always been this way with women and Nash. He rarely felt struck, but when he was he would discover the woman somehow insinuated into the deep reaches of his psyche in some complicated way. She became an essential component of his well-being. He was glad Henry was there to distract him.
Henry drank his beer lying out on top of the common table. Nash put on some very old Appalachian folk music (Harry Smith’s Anthology that Sissy burned for Miranda and Miranda lent to Nash) and started to shut the place down for the night.
“How come you are never around anymore?” Nash said. Henry shrugged. He looked thinner than ever. He smelled of old beer and cigarettes.
“Do you think it’s possible—” Henry started.
“What?” Nash said. Dock Boggs was singing about honey and sugar through some fast banjo.
“Nothing.” Henry finished his beer and pulled another from the six-pack. “Hey, it’s your birthday, isn’t it? You’re fifty now.”
“Not till next week,” Nash said.
“Happy birthday, man.”
Nash waved it off.
“Here’s to fifty,” Henry said. “The beginning of the end. I feel every minute of my fifty-two years, I swear it, I wear them every day.”
“It’s funny, I don’t feel fifty,” Nash said.
Henry turned on his side, propped his head on his hand and studied the flyers on the table.
“I’m turning fifty, and it is just now dawning on me that I have limited time,” Nash said. “No kidding. I always felt my life was circumscribed, but I believed it was because of me, because of the choices I made. Now I realize—and only now, I am ashamed to say—that my life is circumscribed by definition. We are all circumscribed by the finite terms, you know? There is a whole world of things I missed out on and will never experience. Whatever I have done, there is an endless amount I have not done. Do you know what that tells me?”
Henry shook his head.
“It tells me it is not meant to be this all-encompassing journey. It is not meant to be catholic or encyclopedic. By now I have carved some grooves in this life. A few. What I need to do is hunker down and make those grooves deep and indelible. Not the time to dig new ones, you know?”
Henry sat up. “I guess. But.”
“The time now is for depth. Make that grab for profundity.”
“But.”
“Yeah?”
“What if they are the wrong grooves? What if you made mistakes? Shouldn’t you try to make it right, no matter how late it is?”
“Well, of course.”
“Hey, can I ask you something?” Henry said.
“What?”
“Do you know what kind of plastic explosive works best with a delayed fuse?”
Nash stopped midswig on his beer and looked sideways at Henry. “No, I don’t know the answer to that. Why do you want to know?”
“Nothing. It’s just information I’d like to have, you know, in case. I thought you might know because you seem to know a lot about plastic.”
“Right. The explosive isn’t really made of plastic. HMX and RDX are nitroamine explosives. They are combined with a plasticizer, like mineral oil. The binder and stabilizer is made of a plastic precursor, like styrene, but not the explosive substance itself. It is called plastic explosive because it is in malleable form.”
“Okay.”
“Because it has plasticity.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Cellophane
“YOU REALLY shouldn’t drink Coke. It’s like totally underwriting American corporate hegemony to buy Coke,” Miranda said.
Nash nodded and swallowed. “I prefer to call it a bottled soft drink. Or the Coca-Cola Company. I never call those companies Coke or Pepsi. Or McDonald’s Mickey D’s or the International House of Pancakes the IHOP. They’re not my friends. Why should I call them by nicknames?”
“Bottled soft drink, huh?” Miranda said.
Nash nodded. “There’s a generic movement—never use brand names. It’s a kind of mental hygiene.”
“No Kleenex. Facial tissue.”
“Right, no Q-tips but cotton swabs. No Jell-O. Gelatin dessert. There’s a group called Counter Corporate Contamination. They promote generic nonbrands. They fight the infiltration of brand into everyday language. No ‘fun’ corporate acronyms, no trademarks, and God, no nicknames.”
“There isn’t really a group for that, is there?” Miranda said.
“It’s more difficult than you might imagine,” he said.
“No exceptions?”
“Well, there are always some exceptions. Some names are so perfect, so apt, so electrifying with promise and eponymous in an almost magical way that to not use their names would be to deny some delight and truth to the world.”
“Such as?”
“Cellophane.” Nash folded his arms. “Cellophane. It’s beautiful. Much better than plastic film wrap. And it was also appropriated as slang for a drug—a kind of LSD on dissolvable squares of film.”
“And we know what a big fan you are of appropriations. But guess what? So was Coke.”
“Yeah, but Coke is a motherfucker’s drug. And cellophane is also obsolete. It has been defunct for years. Dupont’s Cellophane was overtaken by Dow’s Saran Wrap. Which by the way was made of polyvinyl chloride instead of cellulose, so it was a much more synthetic plastic than cellophane. With an inferior name. Cellophane is a failed and defunct brand, so I’m not promoting anything when I use it. Which, admittedly, is not very often. But mostly I give it a pass because it is beautiful.”
Miranda was lovely. It was true. Nash woke on his fiftieth birthday, and this was the first thing he thought. She didn’t quite realize it. She almost did but not to what extent and why.
The night before, Nash had watched her having a conversation with one of the late-teen testers at the store. She was smiling and talking, but the kid just looked over her shoulder, unsmiling, half-nodding. Nash remembered being a late teen. He wanted to shake the guy, grab him by his ripped jean jacket and shake him, tell him, Look, would you, look and notice please, let yourself see how beautiful this woman is, how perfect, what a masterpiece with her soft thighs and her bitten nails. If only he knew at nineteen what he knew now about how to love a girl like Miranda. To not be scared she might want things from you. To want her to want things of you.
He didn’t want to protect her, or her to restore his youth. Nothing like that. He didn’t exactly know what he wanted. Yes he did—he wanted to be close to her, closer than anyone else. She was awkward and impatient. Too sensitive. She wore the wrong, unflattering clothes, had yet to inhabit herself convincingly. She seemed to have no ambivalence, and endless energy—anything he mentioned she would read practically overnight. She was combative, judgmental, angry. She utterly dazzled him. What a complicated mess of a woman she was, and how desperate he found himself feeling about her.
So here, on his fiftieth birthday, he was giddy with his crush on her, lying in bed with a lazy erection and longing for her. This was a pleasure in itself, just to lie in bed and long for someone. He felt ridiculous, happy, foolish.
But she liked him, didn’t she? That also amazed him. Last night she appeared at his door. She brought over a bottle of wine and even cooked him dinner, didn’t she? She wanted to celebrate his birthday. Sweet, her total incompetence in the kitchen. She fought against her spoiled suburban self, even washed the dishes.
“Don’t condescend to me,” she said, but he wasn’t, she just read his expression wrong. Later, flushed with wine, she began to flirt with him. He could feel her wanting h
im, and he let her lean toward him across the table, touch his hand. It was heaven when she closed her eyes and leaned in to kiss him. He wanted it so much. She pulled slowly back, opened her eyes and smiled. She leaned in again, and he pulled back. She opened her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t, don’t be sorry.”
“I think I have a little crush on you,” she said, all of a sudden willing to give all her trust in the truth. She smiled broadly.
He looked around the room and sighed. “I think you are terrific,” Nash finally said.
“You think this is all very adorable, don’t you?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Yeah, I know you think that, truly. It’s what I like about you.” She watched him from across the table. “I should go before I make a total fool out of myself.”
Nash handed her her sweater. She started to laugh when she stood up, apparently a little drunker than she had expected.
“Watch it,” he said, taking her arm.
“I’m only a little drunk, you know. That’s not why I kissed you.”
“No?”
“No, I did not kiss you because I’m drunk. I got drunk so I could kiss you. That’s different.” She started to move toward the door. Nash grasped both of her hands and squeezed them.
“Be careful, Miranda,” he said softly. He let go, and she left, and he imagined she thought he meant, Be careful, he would kiss her back if she stayed any longer. But what he meant was, Be careful with me. Please. Please.
The first time Miranda talked to Josh was under the auspices of Prairie Fire. Under the auspices of Nash, really, which she found ironic. After his birthday dinner, she had avoided Nash and the bookstore for a few days. She expected him to call her or seek her out. But he hadn’t.