Henry lurched in his bath and then leaned over the side of the tub and vomited. There was some white, chalky goo, which may have been the Blythin. He can’t quite breathe. I am being followed by fire and brimstone, but fire that burns with no flame, just a chemical constancy. He still smelled a sharp whiff of gasoline. They frightened him, these smells from nowhere, their conjured passage from imagination into experience. How can you know things you don’t know?
Agit Pop
MIRANDA EXPECTED August 5 (the date of major tests every year, ostensibly because it was the anniversary of some infamous Seattle Wobbly action in the 1920s) to be a focus for all the actions Nash’s groups discussed. The day came and went, with lots of groups participating, but none of Nash’s did anything. And nothing was said about it. Labor Day weekend was also full of various tests and actions. Again, nothing from Nash’s groups and nothing said about it. By the next planning meeting, this one of the Sovereign Nation of Mystic Diggers and Levelers, it finally dawned on Miranda what Nash was really up to. His groups had no intention of executing any of it. None of them. Not the Barcode Remixers. (They made fake bar code stickers that would replace existing ones. Everything rang up at five or ten cents. This was strictly for the chain, nonunion supermarkets.) Not the New American Provos (inspired by the antiwork Dutch provos, they got jobs at Wal-Mart and then executed ad hoc sabotages). Not the Radical Juxtaposeurs (they rented mainstream films from Blockbuster and dubbed fake commercials onto the beginnings of the tapes to imply dislocated, ominous, disturbing things). The same weird misfits, week after week, with different names and new ideas, new actions, long discussions of smart-ass tactics and tests. But nothing ever acted on. Of course: para-activists, not actually acting but running beside. No one ever said it, you would never know unless you had gone to meetings and paid attention. But it sort of made sense: he always said the actions were for their benefit, not to educate or humiliate the public, even the most evil of corporate bureaucrats. The actions were about keeping their own resistance vital. Direct action to keep you from being absorbed and destroyed. To remind you of what was what. Nash, she realized, had no plans to save the world, or enlighten people or change anything. She was both appalled and impressed, and she couldn’t wait until the day’s meetings were finished and she could talk to him. She wanted to let him know she’d figured it out.
“Want one?” he said, after everyone left. He held up a twenty-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola, its plastic hourglass shape in imitation of or homage to the old eight-ounce glass bottles.
“Once,” she said, “I had this conversation with my elementary school soccer coach.”
“Where was this?” he asked.
“Bellevue. Just on the other side of the lake. We had a great game, and the coach took us out for pizza after. Even in our pretty, suburban, tree-lined town, there was a desperate-looking man outside the pizzeria asking for money.”
“Bellevue, Woodinville, Avondale. Where do they get these names? I mean honestly, Bellevue, who are they fooling with that?” Nash started to get up. Miranda followed.
“We all walked by him, already knowing somehow to ignore him, like how old are you when you learn this? Do any of us even remember when we learned this? So we were stuffing our faces with that doughy pizza and talking about the game.” As soon as they were outside Miranda pulled out one of Sissy’s hash-laced Marlboros.
“I don’t believe you,” Nash said, pointing at the Marlboro package. She shrugged and inhaled.
“It’s more subversive than capitulation or straight opposition to have deliberate, conscious contradictions,” she said.
“Of course, how could I think otherwise?” he said.
Miranda wasn’t flirting, but she did like the way older men (she assumed it was a function of age, even though she had no experience with any other older men in this context) found her weaknesses somehow endearing. And someone like Nash could appreciate her ability to run his game right back at him, to underline his most treasured vanities. He could appreciate the rare form of attention that it indicated; she listened carefully to everything he said to her. After all, what was the point of any of it unless someone paid attention?
“We headed back to the van and walked past the guy lying outside. No one looked at him, and it was even worse because we were all jolly and overfull,” Miranda said.
“You, Miranda, run back and give him your allowance.” Miranda stared at Nash for a long time. He crossed his arms and smiled at her.
“Look, I only smoke hash-lined cigarettes that I get for free or steal.”
“And you realized then and there that you, and you alone, were different, special even. Yes, you, Joan, would save France from the English.”
“And then I only smoke them around people like you, who are so bothered by what other people do.” And she smiled back, but she felt stung and didn’t want to talk to him anymore. She didn’t tell him about how she sat in the van the whole ride from the pizzeria staring out the window, ignoring her teammates. She stared at the big houses set back from the road and remembered when her father drove her family by the public housing projects in the city, and how the people loitering outside glanced at her through her car window, and she looked away.
Miranda sat silently in the back of the bus and listened to the singsong voices of the other girls. The lilt of their young, carefree voices. Finally, she couldn’t help it, and she blurted out, “How can you be happy when there are people with no homes and no food? How?” There was a momentary silence. Then one of the other girls started giggling. And then another girl laughed.
“You have to be an idiot,” Miranda said with a righteous hiss at the girl.
“Well, I must be a complete idiot, because I am hap-hap-happy!” Giggle. Heh, heh. Miranda felt her face get red and hot tears start.
When they got back to school, Mr. Jameson, the soccer coach, asked her to wait a minute. She nodded and wiped her nose. He went past the seat she was in and sat across the aisle from her. He turned to her with a serious frown from which he pressed a tight smile.
“Miranda, you have to understand—” he said. She fixed her gaze on him. She really wanted to understand.
“There are people who are born into this world Indian chiefs and people who are born Indian braves. That’s just the way it is. And that is the way it will always be. Your not enjoying your life won’t help change that. It will just make you unhappy.”
That was his answer; he actually said that to her, and she knew right away that it was a lie. Everyone knows what’s true: you make the world a better place than you found it or you make it worse. Anyone who tells you that isn’t so is just making an excuse for his own inaction. At twelve she vowed to herself never to feel comfortable in the face of things obviously unfair and not right.
Miranda walked away from the bookstore toward the Black House wishing she had stayed and continued talking to Nash. She wished she hadn’t been so sensitive and hadn’t said good night and left. She wanted to talk about the soccer coach and what he had said. And what she really wanted to tell Nash. She’d figured it out, she finally got the joke: The Cult of Lasting Material Invasion, as it was called in this week’s flyer, didn’t ever do any of its actions. Or, another way of putting it, its actions were the discussion and planning of actions. This was a conceptual direct-action group, and no one ever spoke of it — you figured it out or you didn’t.