by Dana Spiotta
Nash heard them explain how they would get this media or that media to notice. In these kids’ mouths the media was not a force they feared or admired but simply a tool they understood. They were more connected and savvy, and also more smug, than any activists he recalled. Except they would never use that word, activist. They were protesters but not that either. They could call themselves resisters, but that sounded so reactive, almost puritanical. Instead they called themselves testers, and they organized not demonstrations or protests but tests. He kind of liked that, testers. What was being tested—the kids or the target? Okay, not bad.
But plenty of other things about the testers did not impress Nash. When he felt particularly uncharitable, he found them entitled in this very dumb and tedious way. Oddly enough, for all their sarcasm and easy, shallow irony, there was still not enough self-reference for him, not enough wit. There was self-obsession, yes, self-consciousness, sure (after all, they always lived as though their lives were all on the verge of broadcast), but no concern with self-implication. Just that ungenerous righteousness, as if merely being young was somehow to your credit.
Nash would nearly give up on them, bored, tired, but then he would notice something to make him interested again. Like the kid he saw the other day as he walked through a test held in Pioneer Square. He was a short, chubby middle-twenty in all-white cotton like an ice-cream man. At some Reclaim the Parking Lot event, or a Liberate the Cement something. There among the usual kids stood this lone fellow in a white coat and white shirt and even a white tie. Spotless. He held a hand-lettered sign over his head, his face expressionless and deadpan. The sign said
World War VI will be fought in my uterus
He held the sign aloft and never altered his stance of intense gravitas. Brilliant. Nash loved kids like that, kids that surprised you and made you feel old and out of it.
He tried to be patient. He would take a deep breath and listen to them. And he discovered that he liked some of them okay, they were funny and smart. They were idealistic and angry. And, let’s not forget, they were stealing. One other way Nash dealt with the epidemic thievery was to hire the very people he suspected of stealing. Particularly if he found them likable and not spoiled. For example:
Roland, the coffee guy. Nash first noticed him hunched over the edge of the table, drawing in a sketch pad, never looking directly at anyone. Roland drew retro Utopian-looking skyscrapers straight out of Tomorrowland or Metropolis with Buckminster Fuller domes in meticulous, boyish detail. He drew mega-tech vehicles and environmental disasters. He wore the same long black duffel coat every single day, no matter how warm it was. Nash figured you gotta love a middle-teen like that. He watched Roland rip off some of the graphic novels—beautiful, expensive books. Nash gave him a job and a store discount. Roland liked working there, he seemed to view the place as his home. Nash was certain Roland was still stealing.
Or Sissy. She was impossible to not notice, with her shiny blue-black hair, sharp, high cheekbones, and wide-set, overly made-up eyes. Nash admired how she was so very pretty but did everything in her power to dissuade you of it. Not just the overwrought makeup, which at a certain thickness moved from augmentation to ironic meditation, but a general ultra-ornamentation. Multiple piercings and tattoos, of course, but she also wore weird, pinned-up clothes—rags that she got at thrift stores in a variety of sizes, often in synthetic fabrics, that she safety-pinned around legs and waist and shoulders. She layered mummy style. Half the time it actually worked; the jumble came across as a planned, intended thing. The other half of the time she looked like a disaster, a freak, a bag woman.
She also had the vapor-thin body of so many of the girls around. They all seemed to be either sensitive-girl doughy or about to disappear. Sissy had a painful, deeply wrenched thinness that radiated hunger but, oddly, not fragility. In fact what came through was a steely, obdurate intractability. He couldn’t quite read that yet—what that whip-thin look meant to these kids. Was it cultural capitulation or rebellion against being a body in general? Against needing to consume at all? Sissy had stolen at least one book, the Vicious Nation’s Biographical Dictionary of Incorrigible and Inscrutable Women. It was almost a junk book of shallow, easy-to-read entries, but somehow it exceeded its own intentions by including some cool and obscure figures like Voltairine De Cleyre, mistress of nineteenth-century direct action, or forgotten-but-verging-on-newly-cool second-wavers like Shulamith Firestone. It was a hefty forty-five-dollar boutique-press monster of a book. As if he wouldn’t notice that gone missing. She looked at it every single time she came in, and then it disappeared. But Sissy also bought things. Little broken-down used books of poems. Kids’ science encyclopedias from the ’60s. Amazing little artifacts that Nash collected for someone just like her. Every time he sold one of his strange used books, he felt vindicated and happy. He hired Sissy to run the evening schedule of group meetings. He told her he needed her help because she knew everybody. Which was true. She also continued to steal.
His hiring strategy may not have headed off thievery, but Nash learned not to take it personally that they stole stuff. As he talked with them, said hello, waited on them, even answered questions, he knew it wasn’t personal because they thought so little about him. He observed and even studied them and all their foibles, but he knew the interest was not reciprocated. They never betrayed the slightest curiosity about him or even addressed him by his name.
However, there was one way Nash was pretty certain they did refer to him, although he never actually heard it said. Loser. This was an inexplicably resilient word, the epithet that would be hurled at someone and then no more needed to be said. Like the word suck, loser had, despite its long overuse, retained its capital among adolescents. No intensifiers made them work better; these were terminal, face-slap, teleologically absolute terms. And both words nihilistically conveyed no real information, just a bottomless disdain. Nash imagined he was often described by these kids as a loser and also someone who sucks. As in that loser sucks. In this respect, as in many others, Miranda was a different case, right from the beginning. Miranda actually initiated conversations with him.
“You shouldn’t drink Coke. You guys shouldn’t even be selling Coke,” she said to him one afternoon, just when he was convinced he truly had at last become invisible. He already knew her name, Miranda Diaz. She was the newer kid. The one he hadn’t noticed stealing. Her face looked ridiculously young to him, smooth and unmade-up, but he figured her for an end-teen. She sat next to him as he took his break. He had just finished hours of used-book pricing and wanted a minute to relax before the evening’s events were under way. He took a swig of his Coca-Cola and nodded at her.
“Yeah, as it happens we don’t sell much, uh, Coca-Cola,” he said. “And, okay, I guess I shouldn’t drink it, but I do.”
She looked surprised for a second, then smiled and shrugged.
“I like this place. It’s great,” she said, again smiling. She didn’t look as young to him now. Maybe it was the way her expression lingered in her face even after she stopped smiling. It was playful, wasn’t it?
“Are you the owner?” she asked.
“Nope.”
She looked at him as though she wanted him to elaborate, and when he said nothing more, she laughed again.
Miranda started to hang around the store at the beginning of the summer. Sissy brought her, or they knew each other. He guessed Miranda was another well-fed suburban girl; usually they look like that when they first move to the city, a little too soft and a little too anxious. Her arms perpetually folded across her chest, legs crossed and then crossed again with her toe hooked under her ankle. Her round face and heavy-lidded dark eyes were offset by a constantly working, overexpressive brow. A little bit of a scowler, this girl, until she suddenly broke into that easy all-points, grownup woman smile. He decided he liked her. She always said hello to him and cleaned up after herself. She studied the flyers and even started to come to a few of the tester meetings.
&n
bsp; Only months earlier Nash had inaugurated the night meetings with a few groups he helped organize, and already it seemed everyone was an organizer. Instead of starting a band, these kids started collectives and fronts and miniarmies. The store even had a wait list for some of the slots. He let Sissy handle all that.
Nash should have felt Prairie Fire as meeting space was a great success, but he found too many of these groups indistinguishable. They wanted to demonstrate in front of a senator’s office with placards. Or they wanted to march papier-mâché effigies of the president to city hall. Some groups tended to be unimaginative and self-serious in Nash’s estimation. This inspired Nash, against his better judgment, to continue devising some groups of his own.
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—”
“I just check out the indexes to see what the reference points are and sometimes the bibliographies. I like to see what they are stringing together, where they came from. I don’t need some academic hack’s introduction to contextualize it for me.”
Nash nodded.
“Sometimes I only read the index.”
“That’s very modern, isn’t it?” Nash said. Now he remembered what a narc vibe this kid gave off. “Some books of philosophy and social theory from independent small presses didn’t have indexes until someone, perhaps an academic hack, added them later.”
“I don’t necessarily want to read the essays as organized. I like to skip around and hunt out specific subjects of interest. I like things chaptered and sectioned. I like headings and subdivisions.”
“Yeah.”
“How much?”
“Fifty cents.”
Josh smiled at that and took a calfskin billfold out of the inside chest pocket of his raincoat. He pulled a dollar out and put it down on the table in front of Nash.
