by Dana Spiotta
“I’m too old for you,” he said.
She stopped smiling. “I know,” she said.
Miranda waited for Josh at the brand-new lo-fi coffee bar on Broadway. Espresso and cappuccino had become so ubiquitous in the city that nearly every block featured an espresso cart, or a coffee kiosk, or a cappuccino counter. The trend was so overly elaborated that the details of consumption became parsed and specific; there were conventions and argot. Cappuccinos could be “wet”—meaning made with not just foam but a little steamed milk. There were macchiatos and lattes, and a thousand variations on beans and brewing. Naturally it didn’t take long for the coolest, newest coffee bars to defiantly serve only drip coffee. In retro, normal-sized cups. Eventually, perhaps, it would be instant coffee. She drank the watery brew and read the paper. She felt excited and high from hardly sleeping. Her skin glowed from kissing a man with some stubble on his face. Her chest was a little red as well, as if she had hives or a rash. It’s weird how when you first sleep with someone it is almost like your bodies are allergic to each other. She felt absurdly pleased, and then she watched for Josh. As soon as she saw him, she would put thoughts of Nash aside, just deliberately unthink them.
The left wall of the shop was covered with underground magazines and newspapers. All those promising titles: Angry Girl and Bitch. Slits & Tits and Heroic Heretic. All these fierce chick zines that claimed to be überfeminist but sounded like S & M porno magazines. Liberation, apparently, had to be appropriation, with double A batteries and a double D bra; pert Betty Paige bangs and no apologies.
She noticed Josh walking slowly toward the coffee bar. He wore a sports coat, corduroy with elbow patches. These days it was either that or the cable-knit cardigan. He looked like a Midwestern professor lately, less young prep and more middle-aged uncle. She found it a bit affected, not that clever. But Josh was a very affected, very formal guy, no matter what he wore. He caught her eye and barely acknowledged her as he approached. He did have such remove. That part wasn’t affected. That part just was. It was enormously alluring to her for reasons she didn’t care to fathom.
“How’s Sissy?”
“Great. We had fun.” She had told him she was spending the night with Sissy. Which was really the plan, until she just decided otherwise. Josh sat and took a sip of her coffee. He frowned a bit.
“Where did you guys go last night?” He didn’t look at her but at the newspaper he had in his hand.
“Here and there,” she said.
“Right,” he said and opened the paper. He was reading The Wall Street Journal.
Together they walked through the ever-expanding ultrahip retail center. Miranda hated it. It was a mall but not called a mall; it was really postmall, a series of attached indoor stores with the sensibility of independent boutiques. Whether they were corporate chains or not (many were owned by corporate chains), they appeared quirky and eccentric. There was a tattoo emporium. A store for DJs, with underground twelve-inch dance records, turntables with slip mats, and metal-braced “coffin” boxes for carrying the records to the clubs. A cineplex showed foreign and independent films. Even an art museum in the basement with video installations. The centerpiece was a large, trendy clothing store called Suburban Guerrilla.
Josh and Miranda wandered into the store, lost and mesmerized in the low-intensity way only an airless retail space can induce.
“The Gruen effect,” Josh said.
“What?”
“When you become narcotized by the retail array, when you enter the shopping soma, the enticement overload.”
Miranda nodded vaguely.
“I’ve been studying it. How the placement of doors and windows can manipulate psychological states. The very architecture makes you feel small and submissive. Victor Gruen was the first to recognize that if you are forced through a series of shops before you find the poorly marked exit, and if you hear music of a certain tempo, and if the lighting is right, you will reach the disassociative state in which you will be vulnerable to suggestion. You will feel the urge, or desire, for impulse purchases.”
“Really,” Miranda said, wandering absently toward a table piled with books, candles, shirts and throw rugs, all done in the same three shades of green-blue. She examined a rack of clothes. There were fake vintage dresses with bohemian patches. Gauze and macramé peasant dresses. Lace-trimmed camisoles next to a poster of Carole King’s 1971 Tapestry album. Angel sleeves and high-heeled boots. Clogs and granny glasses, but also tube tops, denim short-short cutoffs, roller skates. And finally a whole rack of fat, colorful, striped clip suspenders next to long-sleeved sweatshirts with puffy satin rainbows sewed on them, circa 1976.
Josh picked up a reissue of the Silver Surfer comic book from a table piled with puka-shell necklaces just like David Cassidy used to wear in the ’70s. He walked past the selection of graphic novellas to Miranda, who was looking at an earth-art display. A huge poster of Smithson’s Spiral Jetty hung overhead, and underneath were books on contemporary environmental art and land art of the ’70s. There was a DVD on Andrew Goldsworthy, and leaf-patterned bike messenger bags as well as vintage Greenpeace buttons and some vinyl Jackson Browne records in plastic sleeves.
“It’s not just the Gruen effect, you know. It’s the way everything is no longer organized by category but by subject. By theme, everything is tied together by associations of theme,” Miranda said.
“Yes. On the Internet one thing leads to another in this nonlinear, associative way. Increasingly the world will imitate the Internet in how it processes information. Like Allegecom opening its drug superstore in imitation of its hugely successful retail website. The first physical store to spin off a website. Brilliant.”
But Miranda wasn’t listening. She was distracted by one last themed section. The walls were covered in black, and the clothes on the display racks were all black. There were books on anarchy and radical environmentalism. Big coffee table anthologies. But there were also triangle-shaped black scarves for sale—just like the ones the anarchist blac bloc kids used when they busted windows at Niketown and Starbucks last year. Just like on TV.
“Jesus,” Miranda said. Josh came over with a big smirk on his face. He picked up a calendar with “Paris ’68” on the cover, and each month featured a different Situationist graffito. There were posters for Godard’s Le Petit Soldat and the remaster of The Battle of Algiers and a booklet of Weather Underground communiqués. A datebook with a cover photo of Bernardine Dohrn in a miniskirt holding a fist in the air. A vinyl shower curtain with a drawing of Subcomandante Marcos, and a note attached explaining the sales helped the Chiapas Zapatista movement. Ripped and safety-pinned clothes arranged in piles by boxes of vintage Doc Marten boots. And from a lacquered faux milk crate, Miranda pulled out little silk-screened patches meant to be pinned to shirts (never sewn!) that said “Sabotage” and “Anarchy,” exactly like the homemade patches the kids on the street wore. One even said “D.I.Y.” (Do It Yourself). She looked at Josh. “This is totally appalling.”
He smiled broadly. “This is the purity of capitalism. There is no judgment about content. You have to marvel at its elasticity, its lack of moral need, its honesty. It is the great leveler—all can be and will be commodified. Besides, what’s wrong with Emma Goldman being sold at the mall as a cool accessory? It is still Emma Goldman, isn’t it?”
“A confused context is the essence of alienation,” Miranda said.
“Who said that?”
“I did. I think,” Miranda said. She picked up a deck of playing cards. “New Left Series.” Each card had a different photo on the front, biography on the reverse. Dave Dellinger. Mario Savio. Abbie Hoffman. Mark Rudd.
“But you’re looking at it all wrong. See, capitalism can exploit your desire and exploit your need to subvert its exploitation of your desire. It revives—reinforces—itself on the blood of its critics and their critique. It embraces contradictions. It revels in irony.”
“No, that isn’t irony,” Miranda said. �
��That’s just cynicism. And it doesn’t contain contradictions. It just reduces everything to market value. It is simplistic and reductive. The irony is there for you because you are alienated from it but still live in it. The irony is yours, not the system’s.” Miranda looked sideways at Josh. “Or you used to be alienated from it but still live in it. Now you seem to revel in it.”
The “New Left” playing cards even came with instructions for a game to play using them,
Storm the Dean’s Office:
Watch out—if you put the wrong cards together,
there is a sectarian meltdown!
“Let’s take your little friend irony for one moment,” Josh said. “Irony can be the most subversive of stances. It has the potential to undermine and even to redress the hypocrisy and falseness of the culture. But that has become the favorite mode of the new corporate generation. Every ad you see. Even Republicans use irony now. So that leaves the earnest stance you love to use—so tedious, so”—Josh paused—“shrill and feminine,” he continued. “But guess what? It doesn’t matter. Not irony or earnestness or all the stuff in between—the earnest irony or ironic earnestness—can ever touch the perfect, all-powerful, underlying system.”
“That’s a very shallow reading of things. There is still a lot you can do to upset things. You are just talking yourself into something.” She turned over the deck of cards—$19.95.
“My treat,” Josh said.
“I don’t want them.”
“Well then, how about the Movement Rebels, Outlaws and Fugitives playing cards?” Miranda shook her head. “I’m getting them for you. I insist.” Josh took out a gold corporate American Express card and went to the register.
“When did you get that credit card?” she said.
He handed her the package. “You aren’t actually surprised, are you?”
“Actually, I am.”
“I got it with my promotion,” Josh said.
“I didn’t know you got promoted.”
“Didn’t I tell you? I think I must have told you. They loved my ideas for the franchised alternative community. I’m in charge of the whole thing.”
They reached the edge of the mall. The rain was pouring down on Broadway.
“I don’t have an umbrella,” she said.
“You can use my jacket. My car is parked three blocks down.”
“No.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“No, I don’t need it.”
“Okay,” Josh said. “I’ll get the car and bring it around. Just wait here.” Miranda stared at the rain. She watched him hurry down the street. What did she expect?
They drove across the freeway overpass on Eastlake hill. The city looked quiet and deserted, while the freeway was backed up beneath them. Miranda stared out the window. Josh kept looking over at her.
“I’m not going back to New York with you,” she said.
He started to laugh. “It is true that I enjoy making money, I won’t deny it. Thing is, I feel the same. I don’t think I am a materialistic person, you know. I never wanted stuff.”
She leaned her head against the window. Conversations in cars are the strangest, because you don’t look at each other even though you are sitting close enough to touch.
“What it comes down to is I just don’t want to look at other people’s garbage my whole life. There is always garbage blowing around the street outside our apartment. Life is too short. All I want is a clean, quiet place. Beauty and order and peace. If Allegecom contributes—as it most certainly does—to the world’s degradation, undermining, at least in a global sense, order and peace, as well as multiplying garbage, and—let’s face it—suffering, then it also mitigates, quite directly, my own contact with garbage and suffering.”
Miranda didn’t respond. She opened the pack of “Outlaw” playing cards. They were even worse than the other pack. On the front of each card was the photo of a person or the logo of a group. On the back were stats and facts about them done just like baseball cards. There were RAF/Baader-Meinhof cards, Red Brigade cards, as well as cards with individuals: David Gilbert. Katherine Power. Eldridge Cleaver. Miranda flipped through them absently. She stopped at a young man with long, curly hair and sunglasses. He had a familiar quality. She read the back. Bobby Desoto. Alt filmmaker and underground activist. Founded a collective, SAFE (Secret Attack Fear Effort), which allegedly planted bombs at the summer homes of corporate board members. Still at large. Miranda paused, then turned the card over. She stared at the mouth. That crooked smile. Of course. Of course.
“What are you looking at?”
“Nothing,” she said. “These cards are disgusting for so many reasons. If you can’t even see that—”
“Fine. Give them to me then.”
“No.”
“C’mon.” He took them out of her hand and put them in his jacket pocket. She stared out the window, arms crossed.
He reached over to her.
“Do not. I don’t like it,” she said.
He stopped the car in front of their hotel on Second Avenue.
“You’re wrong, you know,” Josh said, taking out the playing cards and waving them at her.
“What?”
“When you said a confused context causes alienation. But altering the context—appropriation—is subversive. Even liberating. Walter Benjamin said that about a thousand years ago.”
Miranda shook her head. “He was talking about art, not people.” She gestured wearily at the playing cards. “Those are human beings. Human beings do not need to be appropriated.”
Augury
NASH WALKED up John Street to a small bungalow-style house. The eaves hung far out beyond the edge of the porch. The curtains on the large front-facing window were drawn. He knocked. No answer.
“Henry?” he said. “Can I come in?”
“Yep.”
Nash entered the dark house. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. Henry lay on the couch in his flannel bathrobe. A throw with a Seahawks insignia covered his lower body. His feet poked out from under the blanket. The toenails were thick and yellow colored. His crosshatched skin at his ankles looked dry and tired. In the end, feet and hands don’t lie. They’re the oldest parts of a body.
“I brought some beer,” Nash said. Henry waved his all-knuckle hand at him to bring it over. Henry had lost so much weight since Nash last saw him. His head looked oversized. Gray stubble covered his chin and neck. Nash popped open two bottles, then sat opposite Henry, in a rocking chair, sipping.
“I look like I’m dying, huh?” Henry said.
“What did your doctor say?”
Henry shrugged. “We can try this or that, but what it comes down to is it is in my bones. How much deeper can it get than the marrow of your bones?”
“I can’t believe it.”
“Death by hubris.”
“What do you mean, death by hubris?”
“Dioxin. Defoliant. We thought we could kill everything that grows and there wouldn’t be human consequences.”
Nash cocked his head, started to speak, stopped. Henry watched a sports channel with the mute on. Kids jumped off cliffs with parachutes and snowboards. The editing was very chopped up and fast. Henry finished his beer and lit a cigarette.
“So what now?” Nash said. Henry pressed the TV remote control. The channels flicked by in silence.
“Should I go?” Nash said.
“No, no. I like your company.”
Nash looked around. He started to pick up newspapers and empty glasses. He emptied one full ashtray into another.
“Don’t do that either.”
Nash sighed and put the stuff down on the kitchen counter. He dumped the ashes into the garbage and brought the clean ashtray to Henry.
“I thought you said the billboard stuff was making you better,” Nash said.
“It did. It got rid of the dreams. But the cancer was in my bones a long time ago. I just didn’t realize.”
Nash stared at the TV.
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“What?” Henry said.
“Maybe it’s just a coincidence, you know?”
“That I got non-Hodgkin’s? That’s what people exposed to dioxin get.”
“But.”
“I got sick due to dioxin exposure from Agent Orange. This is the truth, Nash, and you will have to work your mind around it. This is how my life makes sense. This is how my life signifies something.”
“Okay.”
“I want you to think about it the way I’m telling you to. It’s important for you, trust me.”
Henry leaned back into his pillows.
“The dreams, in fact, have returned. But they are no longer violent and chaotic. They are peaceful and chaotic. Sometimes I see the faces of dead children. Sometimes I see soldiers. But I don’t resist it like I used to. It doesn’t frighten me.”
Henry closed his eyes. He seemed about to drift off. Nash watched him breathe. He could hear the trouble in the exhalations. Henry’s eyes opened with a start. He found Nash and looked relieved.
“I understand everything now. Even you.”
“Oh yeah?”
Nash watched the papery skin on Henry’s eyelids. The eyes twitched slightly. There were dark purple shadows in the creases. The whites of his eyes were not bright. A very fragile affair, an eye.
“I know you tried to take a full swing at it. That’s not shameful. I’m glad for you,” Henry said. Then he seemed to fall asleep. Nash pressed his fingers over his own eyelids and rested his head in his palms. He listened to Henry’s noisy sleep sounds. Henry slept, his face placid and calm, arm over head, in what looked like a repose of surrender. The room did not smell of roses or incense. Or even of ethereal apple blossoms. It smelled of sweat and urine and beer. This almost surprised Nash. And then he got up and walked to the door.
