by Dana Spiotta
Living at the Black House indirectly led her to meeting Nash. It took several weeks for Miranda to get the nerve to actually enter the common room. She was looking for a phone, which she didn’t find. People who wanted to make phone calls used their own cell phones. Sissy told her she could make local phone calls and even check her e-mail at Prairie Fire Books, where Sissy sometimes worked. The bookstore was just a block down Fifteenth Avenue, right next to what Sissy called Lesbian Hardware (because that was what it was, although the actual name was Mother Mercantile). Many times that summer, particularly after they smoked together, Sissy and Miranda would be on their way to Prairie Fire but get sidetracked and end up either blinking in fluorescence at the QFC supermarket or wandering through Lesbian Hardware.
Mother Mercantile was the fanciest hardware store Miranda had ever seen. It was run by middle-aged women with short, salt-and-pepper haircuts. Sissy referred to them as corporate dykes. (Sissy loved to shoplift there, mostly things she didn’t want or need, like a piece of eco-conscious recycled Astroturf, or a very expensive garden spade with an ergonomic “Placoflex” handle made of durable polypropylene covered in a forgiving thermoplastic elastomer. Once she stole a can of Enamel Baby nontoxic acrylic latex paint; soon after, Miranda saw two people at the Black House inhaling deeply as they slathered the paint on the front of the refrigerator. Despite its being toxin-free, eye-watering fumes permeated the whole house.)
The store sold not only handsome tools and garden equipment but lots of sturdy clothing in third world fabrics cut in large, smocky styles. They sold little palm-sized books of spiritual inspiration, which lined the aisle leading to the cash register along with various kites, banners and wind socks in pastel solids or rainbow stripes. During one visit Sissy grabbed one of the wind socks and shook it at Miranda.
“What?” Miranda said. Sissy waved the festively colored fabric tube back and forth in front of Miranda’s face. “Don’t do that.”
“Wind sock people. They are taking over this neighborhood. They take over all the neighborhoods after we’ve made them cool,” Sissy said.
“I didn’t make this neighborhood cool. I just moved here.”
“That’s not the point,” she said, shoving the wind sock disdainfully into her large shoulder bag. Later she would wave it at someone, or toss it in the garbage. It was true, though. Miranda noticed that the owners of more than half the cute bungalow houses in this neighborhood refurbished them and then seemed to mark or declare themselves with a colorful wind sock. In the suburbs where Miranda grew up, people either hung cute “crafty” wood cutouts of ducks and dogs on their front doors or a year-round wreath of dried pastel flowers and brambly twigs. Here in the city they hung wind socks or sometimes wind chimes instead. The subterranean front door of Prairie Fire, covered in flyers and blocked by kids smoking cigarettes, looked shabby and degenerate next to Mother Mercantile’s marbleized portico. Prairie Fire was as much an anomaly in the neighborhood as the Black House. You knew eventually that the wind sock/hardware store element would not tolerate the Black House element, or its bookstore hangout either. But for now it all coexisted, in that exciting way city spaces sometimes contain things in opposition and transition. You could catch actual physical manifestations of larger cultural changes. For the moment tolerance was still the word, and the wind sock contingent considered Prairie Fire a good third place—a social space—for the neighborhood youth.
By the time Miranda starting going to Prairie Fire, Nash’s open-door policy on group meetings combined with the growing social divisions in the neighborhood to create a volatile mix, irresistible to people like Miranda and Sissy. Miranda could feel things gathering their own energy. She could see things happening. And she thought herself quite lucky to have landed, only weeks after leaving her mother’s house, so much amid it all.
Miranda sat beside Nash and again had admonished him about drinking Coke, which became sort of a running joke. Since she began regularly attending his Prairie Fire meetings, Nash increasingly engaged her in long, seemingly discontinuous conversations. No matter the subject, he responded to whatever she said with certainty and as if what he said wasn’t off-kilter and incongruent with what had been said previously. She did think it funny—if someone were to tape them, it would seem as if big chunks of essential conversation had been erased. She attempted to be equally absurd in her return statements. He could read it as flirting, but that would be a mistake. At least Miranda didn’t think she was flirting.
“I hate animal supremacists,” Miranda said, biting at the nail on her thumb.
“I think they are actually called animal rights activists,” Nash said.
She smiled at him and continued. “I do. Their blond dreadlocks and hemp clothes. Reggae-listening, green-panther, righteous rich kids.”
“Are they green panthers, or are they more rightly called panther panthers?” Nash said.
Miranda spoke in a stagy whisper.
“Just look at them,” she said. She tapped a finger on Nash’s arm and indicated several kids loitering around the magazine stand. The usual marauders. Miranda gestured toward a petite henna-haired girl. She wore a camouflage khaki jacket that had a large circle painted on it with fur written inside and a red bar crossing it out. Her pants leg featured a Beef Nation = Killing Fields patch; she also displayed an American Animal Diaspora insignia, not sewn but pinned loosely to her hat brim. Everything she wore had that same contrived, raggedy look. “Especially those militants.” She lowered her voice and shifted her eyes back and forth dramatically. “I live with some of them. Calling themselves Animal Marshals and Liberationists. All that pseudomilitary speak, and the uniforms. I don’t trust them.” She looked at Nash, bit her nail and then continued. “They are offended by fur coats. Yeah, fur coats are offensive, but it is because of the cost, not the animals. Someone spends twenty thousand dollars on a coat while there are people without food or shelter. Can’t people ever feel any shame? What kind of society tolerates the idea of people sleeping in the street while other people walk right by in twenty-thousand-dollar coats? That’s what’s offensive.” Miranda looked at Nash, her eyebrows pressing together, and she took a deep breath.
Nash shook his head. “I had no idea you hated animals,” he said.
She had already made her point, but that didn’t stop her because, well, sometimes she couldn’t stop. That was one of her problems. She would start out trying to be provocative but end up completely earnest about what she was saying. She would start out intending to be cynical and aloof and end up with an embarrassing catch in her voice.
“I just hate people who have the wrong analysis, you know? Who miss the economics. Who just see it as one issue. Who have just enough compassion for the cute animals. Who care about the rest of the people in the world only when it starts to affect their world.” She waited for a response, stared at Nash with her large brown eyes, her mouth a stern frown until she bit her lip, a waiting thing she did that she knew betrayed how anxious she felt and how urgent.
“That’s good for you, Miranda. You must protect yourself with the ‘breastplate of righteousness and the ammunition of determination’ or something, more or less, like that.”
His condescension upset her, but she also knew he was quoting something she should know but didn’t, so she just swallowed it. She liked him anyway—he was smart and funny, yes, but something else, too. It was nice, wasn’t it (or at least different) that he didn’t feel he had to prove anything? Most of the time Nash seemed content to be anonymous and almost egoless. But despite that, if someone did look closely, it was hard not to notice things. The excitement he betrayed during the meetings—she could see it, or thought she could. He had a weathered face, unremarkable except when he broke into this lopsided, purely local smile. He would undermine his own expressions by only half-committing his face to them. His frowns were belied by amused eyes; his grins pushed the edge of smirk by a narrowing boredom in his brow. It could be noted, this tendency. And read as unsett
ling, or intriguing. Miranda, anyway, noticed.
Miranda also began to notice things in the meetings Nash led (or “facilitated,” because naturally there were no leaders). They were held on Tuesday and Thursday nights under Nash’s highly mannered and hermetic nomenclature: SAP (Strategic Aggravation Players and/or Satyagraha by Antinomic Praxis); or the Neo Tea-Dumpers Front; or Re: the “Re” Words—Resist, Reclaim, and Rebel; or the “K” Nation (single-tactic group that merely inserted the letter k or removed the letter k—dislokations were what they called them—to cause psychic discomfort and disturbances. As in blac bloc instead of black block, or Amerika instead of America. They sent out ransom-note-style missives to unnerve their targets: Welkome, konsumers! You have been under attac. Better watch your bac, et cetera). It didn’t take long for her to realize that Nash’s groups never met more than once under the same name. She noticed that the same kids were at each meeting. These were the most wounded looking of the kids who frequented Prairie Fire. The fattest ones, or the ones with the worst skin, or the ones with the most solipsistic hygiene habits.
Was it the same group with different names, or different groups with the same members? Each meeting always started with a demand that all cops and media identify themselves and be excused from the meeting. It seemed at first genuine, then a little self-aggrandizing, and finally, she realized, after the third week, to be a parody of left-wing paranoia, to ridicule the people who imagined they were constantly surveiled or infiltrated. But she couldn’t be sure—it was all those things at once. They were planning to participate in some test or another with hundreds of other groups. Whatever antiglobal or anticorporate event that would occur. They discussed dozens of actions and prankster-type tests: pirating public-space surveillance cameras, infiltrating and disturbing business associations, staging website virtual sit-ins, performing seemingly ad hoc “plays” in malls and other retail environments. They planned to dress in suits and pass out dollar bills in Pioneer Square to the shoppers. They discussed defacing billboards and prancing nearly naked fat women in front of Barneys to ask people as they entered or left if there was anything available in their size. Always they were anticorporate. Mostly they were funny and absurd. And they wanted, it seemed to her, to point out the contradictions that had become so normalized in people’s eyes.
There were other meetings, not run by Nash, but Miranda wasn’t as interested in those. They were tedious and repetitive and conventional. Miranda kept coming to Nash’s groups and became quite excited by the actions they discussed. She truly believed that if people felt the weight of what they did, understood the consequences, it might change their lives. Or they might change their lives. And this would—albeit in small, incremental ways—eventually change the world. It was simple and obvious to her, the truth of such a strategy.
She guessed that Nash had pursued these kinds of activities his whole life. He must know some secret way of being in opposition to the culture at large that didn’t frustrate him. Miranda had felt a passionate and hopeful optimism about people for as long as she could remember, but already she grew frustrated when she realized that others still refused to see the way the world should be. It was like they’d forgotten how to be good. They’d made it complicated.
For all of June and into July, Miranda attended every meeting, and after every meeting she made it a point to stick around and help Nash pick up the recyclable paper cups, and then they would talk, more and more each time, stretching the cleanup into the evening. Nash would open the back door to get air into the hot, stuffy space, which finally began to cool down after the crowds left. She often stood in the doorway and looked at the night sky, reluctant to leave even after they finished the cleanup.
One night, after everyone had gone, Miranda lingered in the doorway, scrutinizing a flyer with the current week’s schedule.
“What is with this group, SAFE? When is their meeting? I mean they are listed, but I’ve never seen them actually meet.”
Nash shrugged.
“What does SAFE stand for?”
“I’m not sure.”
“This isn’t one of your groups?”
Nash shook his head. “I told you. I just facilitate now and then. Make a few suggestions. I believe they are the Scavengers Against Flat Effrontery. Or is it fatuous effrontery? It says on the flyer they meet after the ‘K’ Nation. But then again, I’ve never actually seen anyone from that group.”
“So they don’t meet here?”
Nash pointed to a footnote on the schedule. There was an asterisk next to the SAFE meeting time. The legend at the bottom said, “Meetings as needed and when necessary.”
Miranda tossed the flyer on the table with all the other meeting papers and pamphlets.
“What about colors, Miranda?” he asked as if they were already in a new conversation. She smiled at him blankly.
“What about all the green and black?”
She shrugged. “It’s all right.”
“I think it’s really from comic books,” Nash said. “I know how you feel about militant environmentalists, but they are the badasses these days, you have to admit it. Did you see that green-and-black flag the ecoanarchist guys have? That looks good. You have those appropriated paramilitary colors and materials. That is powerful. Besides, guerrillas have always copped from the military. These kids mix superheroes with defunct army clothes, acronyms and slang. And those woodcut printed posters, too—sort of Soviet Constructivist looking. I think it’s a legit symbolic strategy. Native Americans used to incorporate American flag designs in their clothes to steal the power of the white man by appropriating his symbols.”
“Yeah? And how’d that work out for those Native Americans?” Miranda said. Nash laughed. Miranda felt very pleased when she could make Nash smile, or even better, laugh.
“The point isn’t to win. They’ll never win, of course. They just make persuasive and powerful the beauty of their opposition.”
“Yeah, I guess,” she said. “But wouldn’t it also be great to win? I think you should try to win. Otherwise it is just a gesture. That’s not really good enough.”
Nash didn’t respond. He just crossed his arms and looked at her. She noticed he did that a lot.
Miranda turned away and went back to cleaning up. When she finished, she leaned out the back door and lit up a hand-rolled cigarette laced with hashish. Sissy had given her a couple, and she found them very calming. Nash came over and leaned on the doorjamb. He was slightly built, but sometimes when he moved Miranda noticed he had an underlying wiry strength, a subtle sort of power. She took a hit and offered the joint to him.
Nash ignored it and pointed at the empty meeting table. “I loved that one kid with the black earth painting on his jacket. He looks like a terrorist, not a doughy little geek like most of my guys.”
“You just care about the aesthetics. What about the issues?” she said.
“And there is the pinning of badges instead of sewing. All those block-print silk-screened badges—they go to a lot of trouble to make those, and then to get that, well, recycled look. And the fingerless gloves, the torn stockings. The way they all match each other without even trying. That hobo solidarity.”
“Clothes are shallow.”
“No. What you wear reminds you of who you want to be. If you want to be fierce, or scary, or stealth. Those are the issues. They are part of the tactics. They communicate.”
“But you don’t wear fierce clothes. You dress like—” She stopped, looked him over. Dark blue sweater, stretched and pilled, with beltless, baggy jeans.
“Like a third-rate lab assistant. Like an off-duty security guard. Like a guy whose boss is younger than he is,” Nash said.
“Yeah, well.”
“Exactly.”
“What?”
“Look, I’m beside the point. I have been noticing these sorts of things for a long time, and I have high standards. I try to avoid being shrill and boring. Only someone your age gets away with, you know, being so instinc
tual.”
“You think I’m overly earnest.”
“No, I really don’t. I don’t think I could ever find someone too earnest.”
“Shrill, you find me shrill,” she said. He smiled. She took another long drag.
“But why should you care what I think?” Nash watched her through the cigarette smoke. “Miranda.” And he just said her name, isolated and with enough pause before it to not seem part of the previous sentence. She didn’t say anything. She felt a seriousness she couldn’t quite locate as either his or hers. But there it was, now, between them. Nash raked his fingers through what remained of his curly gray and black hair.
How can anyone claim himself as beside the point?
He looked away first, and she realized she really, really liked Nash.
Vespertine
HENRY SAT ON the couch in his living room. The TV was off, the lights were off. He sat in the half dark, and he could not stop it. It came over him.
He has on a uniform. He is flying with two others. The sky is beautiful, an early morning green-blue. The water below is almost the same color. Only the jungle is different. It is a succulent green, the faint yellow-green of snake bellies and new leaves.
Henry sat on the couch, in his living room. He was awake—his eyes were open. He was sweating and clenching his hands, digging his fingernails into his palms.
It is a camouflage green C-123 Provider. He is not in the cockpit. He can see himself, the spray operator, by the bomber doors, operating and checking huge canisters marked with orange, white and blue paint. The canisters ride four across, snapped in, and he can see through the hatch in the bottom of the plane the spray of white aerosol trailing behind them. They are flying very low. They are buzzing rice paddies and villages. They are aiming for total saturation of the foliage. But it is all fucking foliage, isn’t it? It’s a jungle. Some of it splashes back on him when he adjusts the tanks. He can hear anti-aircraft fire from beneath him. They are so low-flying, bullets seem to back-spray from the ground. One of the drums gets punctured by a bullet, and defoliant sloshes on his arm and chest. The plane pitches back and up, gaining altitude at a sickening speed. He moves away from the hatch toward the interior of the plane.
