Eat the Document

by Dana Spiotta

  The old man glances at the photo. “Yes, I’ve seen that picture. It is terrible.”

  The old man glances down at his retrieved keys in his hands and pauses. Finally he looks up at the camera. The camera stays on his face for several minutes. It is a weary, defeated face. He doesn’t respond but turns at last back to the keys, unlocks the door and enters his house.

  The film shows various ordinary details of the house: The wreath surrounding the door knocker. The woven welcome mat. The glow encased in a rectangle of plastic for the doorbell. The neatly trimmed lawn that edges several flower beds. The oval slates making a footpath. Some garden gloves. Then the film ends.

  There was a brief pause as the film click-clicked until the projector was rethreaded and the film rewound. Their friend Will spoke.

  “You make us pity him.”

  Bobby turned off the projector and flipped the lights back on. He shrugged.

  “He looks haunted, pathetic, old,” Mary said.

  “He is haunted, pathetic, old.”

  “But he bears responsibility for atrocities, and he won’t admit it. He doesn’t even desire our sympathy. You hold the camera on him. You dwell on his shakiness. You let his humanity play on us,” Mary said.

  “Yeah, you seem like a tiresome asshole, a bully, and he seems like a victim,” Will said.

  “That’s the truth. I showed the truth. The truth is complicated. More complicated than we would like,” Bobby said.

  “But are you creating a polemic, a tool, or are you on some ego-artist trip?” Will said.

  “Your film makes things complicated, and that doesn’t inspire action, that inspires despair,” Mary said. “Besides, who says that’s the truth? That’s sentimentality. If he is blameless, then who do we assign blame to? Aren’t all individuals human? Can’t you portray Nixon and Kissinger as lonely, misguided men leading lives underwritten by existential desperation? Is that what the world needs right now? Empathy for all the powerful, careless old men?” Mary became angry as she spoke.

  “I see your point,” Bobby said.

  Later, by themselves, he brought it up. “I feel outrage. I feel anger. But I am undone by sadness. When I am behind the camera, I feel a desire to understand and empathize. To undercut my own points. The truth is, that’s when it becomes interesting.”

  Mary nodded, but she didn’t really listen. She was waiting for her chance to speak.

  “You have to decide,” she said. “You are describing the pursuit of art. Maybe it is a way to make you feel more comfortable in the world. Maybe it is beauty, or even integrity. But meanwhile that is a privilege. A privilege we enjoy at what cost? People are dying and can’t afford that kind of empathy for all sides. Do you think the warmongers and fascists and corporate munitions suppliers waste time feeling empathy? Do they second-guess themselves?”

  Bobby leaned back and put his head on her lap. He looked up at her as she continued.

  “The question is, do we want to leave action to the brutes of the world? This is the moment to decide. There are some inherent problems built into acting. It lacks perfection. But I believe we must fight back, or we will feel shame all our lives. We, the privileged, are more obligated. It is a moral duty to do something, however imperfect.”

  She stopped. She put her hand in his hair.

  “If we don’t do something, all our lives we will feel regret.”

  Two days later, just as she began to relent, Bobby came to her with a plan. And the home and second-home addresses of all the board members from all the relevant corps: Dow Chemical, Monsanto, General Dynamics, Westinghouse, Raytheon, DuPont, Honeywell, IBM and Valence Chemical. He carefully worked out the timing, the execution, the communiqués to the press.

  But now Mary developed doubts. She started to wonder if he had been right in the first place, that denying the complexity of the world made you as bad as they are. Even if you do act, you may be guilty of the wrong motive—vanity, or self-righteousness. Or maybe you will pick the wrong tactic. Perhaps your analysis was incorrect. You could be making things worse, more polarized. And finally, maybe they shouldn’t relinquish their purchase on the humanity of everyone. Maybe that was the very moral line that saved them from becoming the people they despised and judged. She could argue it either way, with equal conviction. But there was no point in discussing it again. She knew he wasn’t looking back. He was now a force in motion. She watched as everything came together. And then she helped everything come together. This was the power of a couple—their doubts occurred at different times and canceled each other out, making them much more fearless as a pair than they would ever be on their own. And that’s how a life changes—it could go either way, and then it just goes one way.

  A week after Louise had decided to turn herself in and six months after she had abruptly lost her desire for Augie, she discovered she was pregnant.

  Revolutionary Acts

  THEY BOUGHT a house in deepest middle-class suburbia. It was a split-level. On a cul-de-sac. In a development with other very similar houses. The streets were clean and empty. The house had lots of room, and nothing was broken. It was a clean, safe place. When Louise opened the front door and picked up the paper, she could’ve been in any state from California to Connecticut. As it happened, August had moved them to Washington State just before the birth. Louise remembered at last feeling a distance from smudgy mimeographed broadsides, leaky faucets, and windows that didn’t stay open unless you propped sticks under them. She lived in skylighted, pachysandra-edged comfort, and she was nine months pregnant.

  Her thin body stayed thin, but her belly grew and stretched beyond her wildest imaginings. She felt passive beneath it—that taut belly led, and she followed. This was the most specific her body had ever felt. She didn’t feel peaceful or beatific. Nothing as typical as that. She felt her life further reduced to maneuvers and negotiation. Very concrete, physical challenges. Getting out of bed sideways. Bending at the knees to put something in the garbage compactor. This precise body ordered her thoughts. I have to pee. I have to move my leg because it hurts. I have to eat.

  And it prescribed what she couldn’t do: She couldn’t get drunk and find some random person to sleep with. She couldn’t run away and change her name and therefore her life—she would still be a nine-months-pregnant woman wherever she went and whatever her name was. And she couldn’t stop it—the barreling of her life toward this new life. So each day she made herself toast and eggs. Each day she watched the TV. She cleaned the house and looked at catalogs. She paid the bills and cooked dinner. When Augie came home, she traded foot rubs with him. She fed him the dinner she had cooked. And she washed dishes, occasionally stopping to prop a hand against her middle back. Augie would ask if he could help her, and she would stoically reply no.

  In the final weeks before the birth, she enjoyed cooking and freezing as much food as possible. This was maybe a typical pregnant woman thing to do: prepare for the days ahead with reheatable casseroles and lasagnas. Louise applied a slightly inappropriate energy to these cooking endeavors. Augie bought a freestanding Sub-Zero freezer for her, and she overwhelmed it with individually wrapped and marked meals. Either a baby or a nuclear winter was coming—in either case, they would not starve. The frenzied cooking of those last few weeks was the most satisfying time of her life so far. It had a twisted optimism. It included a future, which was something she hadn’t seen before. Louise abandoned all thoughts of turning herself in. She had to be who she was for quite a while. She at last had no choice. The baby anchored her, finally, in her world. When she gave birth to Jason, she finally found something she believed time would not ever betray or dwindle. The feeling she had for her son was sentimental, it was frightening, it was unimpeachable. It was self-negating and beyond love. It was an ungentle feeling, this baby love.

  Jason was a demanding child. Before him, the most profound feeling she had had was an all-points loneliness. This loneliness was so profound as to be almost abstract: she felt distance f
rom her distance. There was nothing abstract in Jason’s need for her. It was desperate and constant and loud.

  Louise had felt—for so long—hopelessly different from everyone else. She realized that her despair came from not being truly known by anyone. She understood the animal need to be recognized, to be familiar to others. Her anonymity was what colored her unhappiness, and it only worsened over time. The fear abated, the paranoia, the nightmares. Even the violence, the act, the failure—all of these faded with time. But her loneliness, the crucial difficulty of her underground life, had grown ever deeper and colder—inescapable.

  So was it any surprise that the event that changed her life was Jason? Here was a creature to love and look after in some authentic, permanent way. More than that, he was her obligation. If she turned herself in, who would take care of Jason? Could she abandon him when clearly he required her specific looking after? It was her body that fed him, and her voice that soothed him. Having Jason was either the best thing she ever did or the most selfish. It was certainly the second act in a life that had been entirely circumscribed by her first act, with all the same complications of being both selfless and selfish. Both.

  She discovered a whole new set of fears. She watched him breathe at night in his crib. She wondered if his breath would stop as randomly and mysteriously as it seemed to have started. She feared his fragility. She feared losing him. But she recognized these feelings as what any mother felt anywhere. Any one of us could have bad luck. Any one of us could lose a baby. No mother could be truly secure or certain. We could all get sick and die. We could have broken, deformed babies. We couldn’t control how the child was treated by the world. Or the man. This enumeration of fears comforted her. Calmed her. She was no longer a unique being in a unique position. It wasn’t just her—to be a human is to be perpetually insecure, always edging on death, chaos, the uncontrollable. Being a mother made this apparent. And you get this small window where you can give your child a feeling of unconditional security, no matter how much fear you feel. In creating this sanctuary for your child, you feel comforted in your own anxiety.

  She now viewed the world in a different context. We all can and will be overwhelmed in the middle of the night by the given. And seeing how it is all so fraught and doomed, why not take the greatest risks? Louise felt a cosmic calm as she held her baby and promised to protect him for as long as she could. Giving birth for her was a revolutionary act. How could she embrace uncertainty more profoundly?

  She held Jason under her chin and breathed the scent of his soft hair. To close her eyes and inhale gave her enormous pleasure. It was a kind of bliss that made her thoughtless and tearful.

  One day, when he is old enough to take care of himself, I will sit him down and tell him all about my life. I will turn myself in and do my time. He will understand.

  Occasionally, over the years, she would ask herself, Does he still need me? Is it time yet? And it wasn’t simple, because he would always need her.

  When August had his accident, she saw the effect it had on her son. In the eight years following August’s death, Jason rarely mentioned his father. He never once asked any questions about his death. It was as if August had never existed. More than ever this made her believe it was not yet time for her to act.

  Louise observed her son these days, and he was his own person. Just not an adult. Some near-adult. Jason was soft and doughy. He hardly looked at her anymore. At dinner, he read. The rest of the time he was in his room. If she spoke to him, he displayed such weary indifference. If she touched his shoulder, he flinched. Occasionally, she caught him smiling with her. Other times he stared at her with intense scrutiny. She didn’t mind when he said sharp, even cutting things to her. She was instead pleased that he had wit and intelligence. But most times it was clear he regarded her as a source of annoyance, if not embarrassment.

  Even so, she couldn’t turn herself in yet. Not only could she not tell him yet (soon, maybe) but there was at long last another compelling reason to stay out of jail. She would miss Jason unstoppingly.

  PART EIGHT

  2000

  Ergonomica

  “OUR VISION is a totally intentional community designed by Allegecom for franchising and profit. We will build on what was learned in our first community: green and self-sustaining, but not too. No gray water or too much trouble. Nothing primitive. Green for what is seen. Feel-good relief. Diverse, but not too. Different kinds of people but all with the same desires and goals—to be deliberately there. A gated community, naturally. Communal, but not really. No elimination of private property, for God’s sake. No shared lawn mowers or water heaters.

  “What I am saying is we have the opportunity to make money on certain back-to-the-earth desires, for alternatives to suburbia. People who are alienated by malls and material bombardment. We can give them what they desire. We can take that spirit and exploit it for a franchisable experience if we truly understand it. People want a nostalgic, knowingly referenced community experience. But they don’t really want anything truly alternative. They don’t want a wife-sharing, Manson-esque, un-American, no-property communalism.

  “We have chosen a site five hours north of New York City. Technology allows a postsuburban environment. Let’s call it a radiant posturbia. We don’t need proximity to cities. We are wired. The land we are looking at is near New Harmon, New York. One of those deserted, dying places that will grant us huge tax incentives if we build there. It is rural and beautiful but totally depressed and cheap. Moreover, it has a history of alternative community. In the nineteenth century it had a community of Christian socialists. In the early ’70s it was a women-only commune. Now it will continue its history as alternative to the city, to crime, to pollution.

  “A commune and a corporate community are not all that different. A corporation is merely a commune with different values. But like a commune, everything is organized around a collusion of interests. It creates an inside and an outside. And let’s not forget, all communities are exclusive. By definition you exclude all that is outside the community. A corporation has rights and privileges that are distinct from its individual owners’, just as a commune has collective interests that supersede each individual’s interests. Both allow groups of people to act in concert but without consequence.

  “Organizations eliminate personal responsibility. That is their purpose. And isn’t that what we want? Isn’t that a relief? So here is my vision for Allegecom as communard:

  “Green for what is seen. What does that mean? We want an antidepressant environment. We are interested in the ecology of ease. In other words, we do what is environmentally correct unless it causes any discomfort. Green community, sure, but wired to the hilt—high speed and totally high tech. Free-access homes, built-in hardware and everything tied in to the Allegecom interface to be tracked for marketing purposes. This will also afford people maximal purchasing opportunities. No out-in-the-country deprivation here. Our motto will be ‘Local community, global convenience.’ The logo will use an Arts and Crafts font. The website will be designed to attract the nostalgic. We build archaic-looking icons on our site. We give them a retro interface—things that look old but act new. We fetishize the details.

  “Then we make franchises of our radiant posturbia.

  “We market meaningful community, privatize it, copyright it, trademark it. We build emotional attachment to our logo and to brand-specific experiences.

  “Ultimately we make prefab communities that never feel synthetic or mass-produced. It will be the corporate village that will make money on the desire to escape corporate hegemony. We want to attract the people who hate Wal-Mart. So if we give them the feel of something alternative and unique but execute and control it according to Allegecom’s strict guidelines for optimum performance and return, and of course happiness, everyone wins.”

  Josh sat down. The others at the meeting politely clapped.

  Tourists

  MIRANDA HAD to have one of the large whole wheat scones
from the Mercury bakery. It was one scone, a single thing, and yet it was as big as your outstretched hand, as big as your head. It was a loaf of a scone. With a sort of inhalable relief and pleasure, she got her mouth around the first bite. And black, strong coffee—this was part of it. Yes, a scone, particularly a wheat one, was a dry, crumbly endeavor. So the coffee, its bracing, tannic liquidity, was an essential component of this particular pleasure. She was at it and already dreading the end of her little feast, already on first bite lamenting the diminishing mass of the thing. She felt a nearly existential sadness that her hunger could be so earthy and present but its satisfaction so abstract and impossible to accomplish.

  Someone stood by her table. She looked up, an enormous bite shoved in her mouth. It was Nash, and she felt a blush of self-consciousness over the slab in her mouth. But it was at that exact moment she finally reconciled herself to the fact that she did indeed still have feelings for Nash. She realized he was one of the main reasons she felt so homesick for Seattle.

  He smiled and offered a little wave. She took a gulp of her coffee. She tried to chew discreetly, politely, quickly, so she could speak. But there is no elegant way to chew a large chunk of dry, flaky scone no matter how much coffee you chase it with. What was worse was the coffee was just a tiny bit too hot for this gesture, too hot to be gulped carelessly, and so she gagged a little, inhaled a piece of pastry, and her eyes bugged and watered as she pushed her way through, crumbs spewing slightly.

  “Take your time,” Nash said. He waited. “That’s really quite a monster of a pastry you got there.”

  She nodded. The swallowing accomplished. “I love these scones. I sometimes used to walk all the way across town just to get one. I am a glutton of the first order. You know what I like most about them?” she said.