Eat the Document

by Dana Spiotta

  “Nash?” Henry called out.

  “Yeah?” Nash said.

  “It’s back up, you know.”

  “I didn’t want to say anything.” Nash had walked by the billboard earlier in the week. For months nothing was there, and then a Nepenthex ad appeared overnight.

  “Bigger than fucking ever,” Henry said.

  Jason’s Journal

  My mother is not only, not merely, my mother. She’s a revolutionary. She’s a fugitive. She’s a liar. She’s a killer.

  Consolation

  Henry woke to damp sheets. He felt his sweat, and he felt icy cold. He took a deep breath and let himself slip back into sleep.

  Phosgene gas smells of newly mown hay.

  Lewisite gas smells of geraniums.

  PART NINE

  Contrapasso

  JASON SLAMMED doors and locked them. He shot Louise intense, searching looks that he quickly covered with blank mid-distance stares.

  This wasn’t the usual indifference, but then what was usual? She resisted her impulse to push his hair back from his forehead. He was in an awkward stage, slightly pudgy and spotty. She didn’t mind if he shrugged her off when she put an arm around him. She couldn’t comfort him through his adolescence, but she could stay out of his way. She believed that if she didn’t interfere, her talented, brilliant son would get everything he needed from the world. She also knew that the day would come when he would find her out, but she refused to think about it. Two weeks of his schizoid scrutiny unnerved her. When he finally confronted her, it shouldn’t have been a surprise.

  Jason sat down to dinner. He did not watch the TV or read his book. In fact, he didn’t eat. He just stared at her, and suddenly she knew what was coming. She caught her breath—after all this time, she was astonished it was finally upon her.

  “I watched America’s Most Wanted yesterday,” he said.

  It was really happening, wasn’t it?

  “The show was all about this woman who was a terrorist in the ’70s. She is still at large.”

  Louise felt it physically creeping up on her, making her hands shake. There is an unreality to a moment you have been anticipating your whole life. And then the moment happens and you’re still there, breathing. She felt such relief. An amazing calm overtook her.

  “There wasn’t any show,” she said, quietly.

  “Her name was Mary Whittaker, and they showed a picture of her.”

  “There wasn’t a show,” she said.

  “She was part of a collective that blew up three summer houses of corporate board members—munitions producers, I suppose, I don’t remember. In any case, there was the last bombing when something went wrong—or did it go wrong?”

  “You know about that?”

  “On America’s Most Wanted they showed a picture of Martha Malcolm—”

  Louise shook her head. To hear that name come out of her son’s mouth.

  “How did you find out?”

  “I’m telling you about the TV show,” Jason.

  “There wasn’t a TV show, stop saying that,” she said.

  “There was,” he said.

  “You’re lying,” she said.

  Jason started to laugh.

  “I’m lying, huh? That’s fucking rich,” he said. “Why don’t you look at me, Mom?” He glared at her, his face red and angry.

  “You shouldn’t judge something you don’t know about,” she said.

  Jason put his hand under his plate and flipped it off the table. It crashed on the floor. Jason squeezed his hands into tight fists. Louise stared at the plate. And then something happened. He started to cry. Louise hadn’t seen her son cry since he was a toddler.

  “I was going to tell you one day. I can tell you about it now. If you want to hear about it, I will tell you,” she said.

  He wiped his eyes.

  “You can’t look at what we did in a vacuum. This immoral war was going on and on. And whatever we did, we thought it would help scare them into ending that war sooner.”

  “Yeah, how’d that work out for you? Didn’t that war last like nine years?” Jason said.

  “It doesn’t only matter if we succeed in our intentions. It matters what our intentions were. We wanted to do something. There had been years of peaceful efforts. Things escalated. It was an act of desperation.”

  Jason nodded.

  “You must believe that we never intended to hurt anyone. That was a terrible consequence that we never desired or sought. Which doesn’t excuse it, but maybe it makes it more understandable to you.”

  “It must have crossed your mind, the risks you were taking, and not just with your own lives. But that doesn’t even matter to me. Whatever. I mean, I can easily buy that you were foolish enough not to realize how inevitable it was that planting bombs would lead to killing somebody. I just can’t believe you lied to me all these years about who you are.”

  “I planned to tell you when you were old enough. When I was ready to turn myself in. The last thing I would ever want is for you to have to keep my secret.”

  “You want to turn yourself in? After all these years?” His tone had changed slightly. He sounded surprised.

  “I’m so sorry. About all of it. But yes, I plan to turn myself in as soon as possible.”

  She gripped her hands in her lap and waited for the withering speech that would come next.

  “Did my father even know the truth?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s amazing,” he said.

  “It sounds amazing. Most of the time it was just everyday. Except no experience was ever one hundred percent what it was. There was always this extra thing, this underlying doom.”

  She started to pick up the spilled plate and food. “I’ll clean it,” he said.

  When he finished he sat down across from her. She took her pipe out and started to smoke. She held it out to him, and he ignored her offer.

  “It was something, though, what you did. You had guts, really, I never would have guessed,” he said.

  “It was a huge miscalculation. A huge mistake.”

  “At least you did something. What a world that must have been where ordinary people actually did things. Things that affected, however tangentially, history.”

  She tried to think of what to say next. But she couldn’t speak. She felt such a huge sense of relief. She felt so grateful to her son. How did she get such a break after everything else? She reached her hand out to touch him.

  “Jesus, don’t get carried away.” He shrugged her off. “I haven’t forgiven you for lying my entire life.”

  She laughed.

  “I’m glad you think that’s funny,” he said.

  “No, I just think you’re funny. You really are very funny. I’m not ever funny, am I?”

  “Oh yeah. Here’s something that will make you laugh,” he said. He handed her a piece of paper with a phone number on it.

  “What is it?”

  “Bobby Desoto’s number. His name is Nash Davis, now. In another thrilling twist of fate, he lives not very far from here.”

  She clutched the piece of paper. She hadn’t expected this at all.

  “How did you find him?”

  “I tried different possibilities. Finally I used the acronym from the film collective. There were a few American references to SAFE on the Internet, but one stood out. It was for an anarchy board that posted something for the Prairie Fire bookstore. I investigated this SAFE and discovered it stood for Scratch Artists for Effacement. It is a notorious meta-prankster group that semi doesn’t exist. That just reeked of Desoto to me. This guy Nash Davis organizes events at Prairie Fire. So I called him. Bingo.”

  “You really are smart,” she said.

  “Don’t get carried away.”

  Louise remembered every detail of the day she first met Bobby. He kept filming her at a protest at the draft board. He followed her around until she finally told him to stop. She recognized him. She’d been at a happening where they sho
wed some of his movies. He agreed to stop filming her if she would get some Chinese food with him.

  After they ate he took her to the Valence Chemical building downtown. He walked her down the hall, pulling her by the hand. He opened the doors marked “Private.” He was gleeful and fearless as they went from room to room. He also seemed to know where everything was. He pulled her into an empty room full of file cabinets. He glanced at her, opened a couple of drawers and threw several stacks of files in the metal wastebasket. He lit them on fire with his Zippo lighter and pulled her out of the room laughing. He tried another door. It was locked. He looked up and down the hall, then took out a metal tool and jimmied the door open. He pushed her inside and closed the door. It was dark, and he leaned her against the wall and kissed her.

  “I’m showing off for you. Aren’t you impressed?”

  “Very,” she said. Then he kissed her again. Later that night he would confess that his father was the head of the Research and Development Department at Valence Chemical. He hadn’t told any of his movement friends about his family. His father practically invented (or at least developed) applications for several synthetic polymers: polystyrene and polyvinyl chloride. This was part of a revolution of industrial thermoplastics. Nash’s father pioneered plastics that were used to make stable film stock, long-playing records, PVC piping, water beds and—inevitably—various kinds of munitions: plastic fragmentation mines as well as particularly vicious plasticized gasoline and white phosphorus bombs that made—as they detonated and burned with a relentless, stubborn, chemical stink—the most beautiful, white, elegant-but-brisant smoke trails.

  After that, they stayed together every single night until they went underground.

  The bar in Belltown had seen a series of better days. It was attached to an old hotel, which way back when had captivated the hip youth of the music scene. They moved on, leaving the bar and hotel to budget European travelers, who then gave way to the single-room-occupancy crowd. Louise waved the cigarette smoke away as she entered. It was still light outside, and this was not the sort of place that worked at all during the day. But it was deserted, and she understood why Bobby had chosen it.

  She saw him at a booth in the back. She was shocked to discover that, beyond his looking old and frail, or in spite of it, he was unmistakably Bobby, and she felt the same as she had twenty-eight years earlier: the air felt thin, and her whole metabolism quaked at the sight of him. She closed her eyes at the inner flutter, and it pleased her to feel it, it really did. Then she of course started to cry. Bobby stood up as she approached. He reached for her hand, and she pulled back, out of reach.

  After a minute she sat down. Bobby grasped her hand before she had a chance to stop him.

  “It’s all right,” he said.

  She said nothing, pulled her hand away and pressed both palms to her eyes. She inhaled. She took a paper napkin and pressed it to her face. She raised her hand at the bartender.

  “Some bourbon. That one,” she said, pointing to a bottle.

  “Two,” Nash said.

  “I’m turning myself in,” she said.

  Nash drank his bourbon.

  “I wanted to let you know. I won’t say anything about you, of course, but I thought I ought to warn you just the same since Jason got in touch with you so recently.”

  “I had a feeling you were going to tell me that,” Nash said.

  “They may figure it out anyway, but they won’t hear it from me,” she said. She looked away, but she could feel him watching her.

  “It feels exactly the same being with you. It is just the way I remember it,” he said.

  “Yes.” She forced a swallow.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t care if they find me,” he said.

  “What do you mean you don’t care?”

  He pushed his empty glass toward the center of the table. “I decided about ten years back I wouldn’t hide from them anymore. I would just do my thing, inconspicuous and law-abiding but not hidden and paranoid. I tread lightly, sure, but no more running away, no more name changing, no more cold sweats in the night. I just do my thing and accept that sooner or later they’ll figure it out. Jesus, your son figured it out in like a week. So I will just go on until the day, which will seem like all the others, that I am finally apprehended.”

  “I get it,” she said.

  “Apprehended, though, that’s the word, which is seized and taken, a much more accurate word than arrested, which means stopped. Because things don’t stop at the arrest, do they? They begin there with a whole world of trials and lawyers and then the plodding consecution of those endless, circumscribed, uniform days,” he said.

  She exhaled. She felt so weary.

  “Are you really prepared for all of that?” he said.

  “What you describe isn’t so different from my current life. But if you know they’ll get you, why not turn yourself in, make a better deal?”

  “No way. I will sit in my little bare room forever, but no way will I volunteer to sit in their little bare room. I just won’t make my so-called freedom a prison by trying to evade them. I did that for too many years, and I won’t live like that.” Nash sounded as though he was about to launch into something, but then he stopped. “But, of course, you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

  “Goddamn it,” she said, lowering her voice. “It would have been so much”—she didn’t want to cry again—“so much easier if I knew someone else in the same position. If we could have talked even once.”

  A few more people trickled into the bar. Louise started to get up to leave. “I have to go.”

  “Wait,” Nash said. She stopped. “Listen, you should tell them about me. You can get a better deal if you tell them,” he said.

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Yes you can. You want to spend time with your son again, don’t you? Be part of his life. Because that is what we are talking about. You tell them it was my idea. You tell them you didn’t realize what you were doing. Mary, take advantage.”

  “No.”

  “I owe it to you,” he said.

  “No you don’t.”

  “I want to owe it to you.”

  She was starting to feel dizzy. “I thought you always blamed me for what happened.”

  “Never. I knew how it would go. I knew someone was going to end up dead,” Nash said. Someone sat in the booth next to theirs. Nash leaned toward her a bit and spoke in a low voice. “There was a moment, a very clear moment, when I knew not only that it might happen but that it would definitely happen. And I was still willing to do it. And not because I really believed we would change anything for the better. I did it as a testament to my own certainty, as a test of my conviction. I needed to prove to myself I could go all the way.”

  “I didn’t realize we could kill someone,” Louise said.

  “Let me ask you something. If we had killed one of the targets, one of the board guys who knowingly developed land mines or antipersonnel devices, dioxin poisons or napalm. If we had taken out someone like that instead of a housekeeper, how would you feel about it?”

  “It would feel no different. It still would have cost everything and probably changed nothing. Nothing for the better, anyway.”

  “I’m not so sure. I’m more culpable, see? You are excused. I am not.”

  She rubbed her eyes. She felt totally drained.

  “So turn me in,” he said.

  “You sound like you want me to do it.”

  “There was no answer.”

  “Try again.”

  “I let it ring and ring.”

  “Maybe you dialed the wrong number.”

  “No, but I’ll try it again.” Louise remembered exactly how it all went down. She remembered how Bobby took a deep breath and then picked up the receiver.

  “There’s no time,” he said. He looked at his watch.

  “How much time is left?” Tamsin said.

&nbs
p; “Thirty minutes,” Bobby said.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Maybe she already left,” Bobby said.

  “She might be vacuuming and not hear it,” Mary said.

  “Jesus, oh shit,” Tamsin said.

  “We have to call the police,” Mary said.

  “Yeah, I’m doing that,” Bobby said. He grabbed his jacket.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to use the pay phone on Eighth Street. You keep trying that number.”

  “Hurry up!” shouted Tamsin.

  Bobby looked at her, then spoke to Mary. “I’ll be back soon. Everything will be fine. Don’t panic.”

  “Yeah.”

  He ran out.

  Tamsin started muttering. “I knew this would happen. Oh God.”

  “Nothing has happened. Let’s keep trying the line.” Mary dialed and waited. A busy signal. She held it out so Tamsin could hear it. She redialed. The repetitive signal sound.

  “I think the phone might be off the hook.” She looked at her watch. Time just kept going forward. Everything kept going forward. The moment approached. Tamsin was crying.

  “Maybe she left.”

  “No, the phone is busy.” How can this be happening?

  Bobby came back.

  “Okay, people, let’s get it together. We split up. Listen to the news. If everything is okay, we meet at the farmhouse and stay there until things cool out.”

  “And if things didn’t go okay?” Mary said.

  “We do what we discussed we’d do. What we have to do.” Bobby grabbed Mary’s hand. Tamsin was at the door, leaving. “Tamsin!”

  “What?”

  “Be cool. Don’t panic.”

  She nodded. Then she left.

  Bobby shook his head. “Shit, I knew it.” He pulled their bags from under the bed and looked around. He started to quickly pack.

  “It’s going to be okay, isn’t it? The police got there in time, right?”