by Dana Spiotta
Seven days passed, and she couldn’t bear it any longer.
She walked straight to the back of the store, right past Nash, and ordered a chai tea from Roland.
“Hi, Miranda,” Nash said from the table where he sat.
“Hey,” she said, cupping her tea and studying it. She walked to a secluded corner and sat. She picked out a book and began to read, furrowing her brow and concentrating. She read the sentences, and then read them again, but all she could think was, Why did I have to come in here, looking for him? After all, I kissed him. She parsed through that evening again, as she had been doing all week.
Not only did she kiss him but he didn’t really kiss back, did he? He just handed her her sweater when she said she was leaving. How foolish she was. By the time Nash came over to where she sat holding her book, Miranda felt close to tears.
“Why haven’t you been in?” he said.
“I’ve been busy.”
“We are having a big plenary tonight—remember?”
“Of all of your groups? That should be interesting since they all have the same members.” Nash laughed, and she glared at him, refusing to laugh.
“It isn’t any of my groups, I promise. It’s the Green and Black Action group. The GABA Group. I merely facilitate it. You should come.”
“Maybe.” She shrugged and turned a page in her book.
“Miranda.”
She looked at her watch and got up. “I’ll try.”
The GABA Group plenary was not promoted, and people heard about it only through word of mouth. Despite that (or because of that) everyone in the Black House, including Sissy and Miranda, went.
Nash was interjecting during a discussion on direct action, not leading, of course, but moderating, guiding. Facilitating. Miranda thought, Ha, right. He had been talking for at least fifteen minutes.
“It is not so much that we do direct action to get a certain result, you know, like pass anti-global-warming legislation,” he said. “We do an action for the action itself. Our act is the end, the point.”
“But we do also want to direct the action at something, don’t we?” Miranda says.
“Sure, we do. But I’m saying in our quest for whatever goals we have, we should make sure the tactics themselves are reflective of those goals. We dance in the street and stop traffic not because we want to be on TV to get our message out but because we like to dance in the street. It’s the world we want to live in.” Nash took a deep breath and smiled in spite of himself. “It is in itself organic and original and full of a delicious solidarity that is usually difficult to come by.”
“Or we could just talk about actions and never do them. Not dance but think about dancing. That would be really subversive,” she said flatly and looked at the ground beneath her sneakers.
Miranda hated when Nash used words like organic and solidarity. He sounded like an old hippie then, worse, like a caricature of a hippie. He of all people should know subversion started with the language you used. But Miranda couldn’t help but feel bad for Nash, despite her hurt feelings. And she knew the other kids weren’t really listening. The guy with the black-and-green flag on his jean jacket? He just couldn’t wait to break the window of a Starbucks for whatever reason.
“I have some plans for an action we should do downtown. The new shopping-oriented downtown. We dress in business suits and are stationed in all different locations around Fourth Avenue. And just at 12:30 p.m., the most trafficked time of day, we all head toward the traffic island at the center of the street. We approach at precisely the same time, briefcases in hand. Incidentally, this is where all the surveillance cameras converge.”
Nash crossed his legs. Miranda thought he should sound less calm and more angry. He should sound like there was something at stake. But that wasn’t even it. He couldn’t resist himself, could he?
“So we approach the traffic island at precisely the same time, maybe thirty or forty of us. The clothes have to be perfect. It is fine if we have dreadlocks sticking out or whatever, but it must be suits and ties and briefcases. Women can wear the skirt and jacket, the power bow. The point is to look uniform and of an easily identifiable type. We originally wanted car-mounted sound systems to play Swan Lake or something. But I think we would be arrested in no time for public loudspeakers without a permit.”
“So what?” The green-and-black flag guy. “Let them arrest us.”
“Well, if we get arrested we can’t do the action. The object is not to merely be arrested. At least, that is not my object,” Nash said. “We do a kind of Busby Berkeley synchronized dance, a serious, deadpan, perfectly synchronized show, with briefcases aloft. We stop people going into the stores and in their frenzy of shopping, not because we physically block them but because we entertain them for a moment, we amuse them, intrigue them. There among the glittering billboards corporations pay thousands for, we engage everyone’s attention out of sheer whimsy.” A girl spoke out from the back of the crowd. “So what the hell is the point? Are we going to even have information for people about the sweatshops that produce the Gap shirts they are buying? Or the way their fast-food restaurants are destroying the ecosystem?” The tone of her voice—the tenor of the earnest whine—contained a sort of tremolo that hung perpetually between an accusation and a dissolve of weary, resigned tears. Miranda found it tremendously unpleasant. “What is the point?” she repeated.
“The point is for us, the players, and perhaps them, the audience, to feel for one second as if we didn’t have AOL Time Warner or Viacom tattooed on our asses,” Nash said. Miranda chewed at her fingernail. He was right.
“And disruption is liberating, especially if it is a formal, organized disruption,” Miranda said. Nash smiled at her. “Mere chaos causes anxiety. Preaching didactically causes boredom. But a formal disruption—”
“Then it approaches beauty of a kind,” Nash said. “Then you begin to really be dangerous.”
After the meeting, she went outside to smoke one of her edge-erasing hash tokes. Nash sat by himself drinking a soda. She walked right past him to where Sissy stood talking to another girl. She left with Sissy, arm in arm, until the next scheduled group began.
The so-called hactivists were up next—the Net geek guys that advocated hacker-type direct action on the Web. She wanted to hear about this, but she especially wanted to see them, the ones who could break laws and destroy things all from the comfort of their homes. Miranda didn’t trust these guys—and naturally, they were all guys. She imagined them to be the same pale, socially isolated creeps who chronically masturbated to Internet porn—not even photos of real women but those cartoon-videogame chicks, the gun-wielding pinups with their glutes bursting out of torn, tight short shorts, all made by some other sweaty, pale guy in a room somewhere. She wanted to check out the kinds of guys who were turned on by these virtual, man-drawn women.
A group of young men crowded the back of the store. They didn’t look all that different from the usual crowd, save a few skinny guys in T-shirts that said OPEN SOURCE or COPY LEFT—GNU/LINUX or simply FUCK MICROSOFT. Nash sat toward the front with a thinly veiled expression of condescension. All at once Miranda felt bad for him again. She wanted to take Nash by the hand and show him how to use Listservs or something. And then, out of nowhere, she thought it. She thought about Nash, in her room at the Black House, in her space. She thought of kissing him and how he would hesitate at first and then kiss her back. She imagined undressing herself and pulling him down on the bed. She imagined his adoring expression. It excited her to be eighteen to someone like Nash. So much more fun than being eighteen to someone who was also eighteen. She really flushed thinking this, and Nash smiled at her because she was staring at him, and she quickly looked away. She turned to the front of the room, where some e-freak pornographer was about to begin.
It was Josh. Josh Marshall, from her old high school. He graduated two classes ahead of her, and certainly she didn’t know him very well, but she used to see him every day. He was not a
sweaty little social misfit. No, Josh Marshall was the straightest boy she could imagine. Tall and good looking in an unremarkable, clean way. He wore a uniform of button-down shirt, flat-front khakis or tidy jeans, and brown loafers. Shirts always tucked in.
“Mostly what I thought we could go over is how denial-of-service or flood attacks work and—my specialty—how to hijack sites. You might remember how the address for the IMF meetings was redirected to the green anarchist site. This lasted for about twenty hours. Their site was not altered, we just inserted a program that redirected anyone accessing their address to another site.”
He glanced at her and smiled in recognition. He had never smiled at her in high school. Miranda tried to piece it all together. Certainly Josh was a smart guy. But he was so sunny and so destined for full-steamed establishment success. As he spoke she began to understand. His normalcy was so extreme as to be perverse. No one was that clean-cut, that inadvertent, that unobtrusive. That shy.
“The best kind of hijack is to create an alternate site that looks and behaves just like the real site. I call these parasites. But the links are altered, the information is rearranged so that the truth can be disseminated, but also so misinformation can be posted about where they are meeting and other logistics, as well as some irreverent information just to ridicule them and underline their hypocrisy.”
“How long do you get away with it?” Nash asked.
“If you do it gradually, and don’t shoot your wad all at once, you can string them along for weeks. Monsanto took two weeks to notice. People look at their sites but don’t really ‘read’ the rest of it. And if you imitate their language, and their design, you can often tamper extensively and extendedly.”
“But ultimately detected.”
“Oh sure. Especially if you are giving out false information about meetings and such. It is admittedly a limited gesture, but you can really humiliate these corporate site designers. And these organizations.”
Who would have guessed, Josh? That was how it should be done, she thought. Look and seem straight and law-abiding but actually do things to subvert the status quo. Do something genuinely subversive.
When the meeting ended, Josh walked over to her and asked what she’d been up to since graduation. She invited him down the street to check out the Black House. She didn’t think twice about it—Josh was the kind of guy she generally didn’t get any attention from. She liked listening to him. And she really liked leaving with him.
After everyone left, Nash sat for a while. He didn’t feel like cleaning up the flyers and coffee cups by himself. Even Henry wasn’t around to distract him. Instead Nash lay down on one of the benches and listened to Mingus Ah Um.
It was okay, really, because Josh was her age and that was the way it should be. And Josh was smarter than he thought. Any nagging feelings of doubt, any issues he had with Josh’s character or intentions were not based on anything articulable or objective. He knew his bad feelings came from a little jealousy. The truth was, Nash also felt relieved. He didn’t even mind, too much, when she stopped coming in altogether. He knew that time would make all his twinges fade and eventually go. He knew this because he’d had to let go of things before, as everyone did. It was sad to admit it, but forgetting was a slow, gradual liberation. But knowing this about himself also proved that at some level you don’t completely forget the things you endure. They just fade until it almost seems as though they happened to someone else.
He would get used to not seeing her in the store. And later, when he saw them walking together on the street, he reassured himself that it was a good thing for her, and maybe it really was.
Without Mouths
SOME DAYS Henry thought exclusively of the evening to come. He would walk around the city, doing his upkeep on his buildings, blinking in the sun, and he would tremble with dread.
He could manage, most days, to redirect and distract. Five weeks went by, and he got nothing. They have finally left for good, he thought, then stopped, retracted that. He had become fervent in his superstitions. Every thought, every move seemed to require a countergesture just in case.
He lay on his bed and nothing came. He rigorously avoided dark thoughts. He watched television. He dropped into sleep, or at least a tossed, soporific stupor, and then he woke with a start to an extra-loud infomercial, his shoulders mangled into the couch, his throat parched.
He felt fear at a distance first, and then more intensely as it had a gaming, even playful approach. Don’t look at the clock. Just turn off the set and go back to sleep.
But as he got up off the couch, he glanced at the wall clock: 3:00 a.m. He couldn’t find the remote, so he pushed the power button directly on the television. The room abruptly went silent. He felt a creep of adrenaline as he listened into the night. He tried to laugh it off—just don’t start listening for things.
He felt his heart beating faster. He felt the silence of the house overcome by a multitude of tiny midnight sounds, just like how the dark outside will fade as your eyes get used to it until gradually you can see the thousand stars, the trees, and the moon shadows on the ground. He heard the hum of his refrigerator kick in. He heard the rain tack against windowpanes and roof. He heard the furnace die down.
He woke again with another start at dawn. He felt relief: not only could he not remember any dream of any color but there was the blessed weak sun and all the glorious diffused light of a Northwest sunrise. He lay back on his pillow feeling at a great distance from all his worried ruminations during the night. Then, gradually, almost imperceptibly, he felt an odd breeze—a tropical, slow heat blow languidly across his face.
Shit.
Henry is in a narrow street. He smells nothing of the palm trees he passes, nothing of the hot pavement he walks on. He smells instead a monolithic bludgeon of a smell: an oily-yet-astringent, froggy formaldehyde smell. He turns in to a doorway. It is the Saigon hospital. But it is Ho Chi Minh City now, and he is there for a reason.
He walks down a corridor to a special division. It is quiet. He pushes open a swinging door, and he steps inside.
The smell of formaldehyde is acute now; he puts his hand to his face to no avail. He sees, in shadows at first, then more clearly, rows of large glass containers. There must be two hundred of them. Then his eyes adjust. He sees the forms suspended in fluid. Flimsy, fetal, tiny beings. The doubled forms with one body half-grown into the other. Faces without mouths. Limbs without digits. Mono-eyed stares. The formaldehyde smell continues, and the bodies have a translucent cast in the bottles. There is no constant among these catastrophes except why they are here, in these jars, and what they signify.
When Henry stopped he wasn’t puking, or even crying. He stared at the sunlight in the room. What can sunlight do for me? He knew, if not today, or in a month, he would again smell that viscous formaldehyde in his nose and throat, right in the light of day.
What else frightens Henry:
Chloropicrin gas smells of apple blossoms.
Hydrogen cyanide agent smells of toasted almonds.
and
Asphyxiants, vesicants, lacrimants.
and
The things that must be answered for are without end.
I’m with the Bandwidth
“JUST MAKE yourself at home.” They had been together for a few weeks, but things moved slowly. This was the first time Miranda had been invited to his house (actually his parents’ house). Josh went straight to his computers. He owned two gleaming flat-screen monitors with protoplasmic, translucent gray-blue casings and sleek, silent keyboards, ergonomically contoured in the middle. He had no mess, no clutter. No loose papers.
“I like keyboards that click,” she said. He looked at the screen. He seldom touched the mouse but used everything on programmed key command.
“I don’t like squishy keyboards,” she continued. He checked his e-mail. It looked like he had about two hundred messages. He opened one from the list and scanned it quickly. It was strange that Josh lived in subu
rban splendor in Bellevue. He stayed a couple of nights with her in the city, sleeping over but still not having sex (not completely anyway, which was somehow mutually acceptable to both of them though they didn’t speak of it). She didn’t mind that he didn’t stay much past dawn. Or that he preferred his room at his parents’ house.
“Let me just reply to this. Give me a minute.”
“Too soft and squishy…” Miranda turned away from him. She couldn’t really be surprised by anything Josh did—he was deliberately full of surprises, which naturally became anything but surprise.
She had to admit that when she finally got here she felt a pang of longing for spotless suburbia. After she stepped over yet another kid at the Black House. Or just the odor from the fridge. And Josh’s house was the highest realization of suburban splendor she had ever seen. His room was very large. Past the desk and entryway a carpeted step led down to the area where the bed was. The room was done in shades of gunmetal gray-blue. Sleek and spotless. No pictures of Che, no volumes of Noam Chomsky. In the corner of the sunken area, a large double bed, neatly made, and beyond it two door-sized windows that led to what looked like a balcony. Above the bed, a skylight. To the right a door to his private bathroom. This was the sort of contemporary home in which there were at least as many bathrooms as bedrooms.
“Okay, done.” He turned to her on his swivel seat. He reached in a drawer and pulled out a small bag of pot. He started to roll a joint.
“You just keep it in your desk, out in the open?”
Josh smiled. “Oh yes. They would never look in my drawers without my permission.”
Miranda shook her head.
“I mean, does this look like the room of a pot-smoking loser?” he asked.
“No, it doesn’t even look like the room of a human being.”
“That is lesson number one. You control what people believe to be true about you. All of it is subject to manipulation. You can avoid interference very easily. Most people are quite shallow about their judgments. Even parents.” Why, Miranda thought, does everyone think I need lessons all the time?