She wanted to tell him that she’d figured out his para-activist stance and it wasn’t good enough. Not nearly. That it was just another kind of lie. And that’s not all she wanted to tell him. See, it wasn’t just the hash Marlboros. She sometimes ate hamburgers from McDonald’s. She was indeed the one to take big, luxurious wads of toilet paper and inches of Kleenex at a time. It got even worse. When no one was looking, she sometimes threw stuff in the garbage. Newspapers and glass bottles. Easily recyclable stuff. Right in the garbage. Shoved it down so it was buried. Even her mother didn’t throw that stuff in the garbage. Because she couldn’t help it, she just did it and felt guilty about it. That was part of why she talked to Nash in the first place. Because she saw him there, at the meetings, drinking a Coca-Cola.
And finally she wanted to tell him that the world offered horrendous terms, a terrible, huge price was paid in actual suffering, and if you didn’t try to change that or mitigate that, your life was indefensible, wasn’t it? And if he was being clever, or cynical, in the face of that, well, it was wrong. And if she was overly righteous and simpleminded about things, then so what? And maybe she wanted to say something else, but she didn’t even know what that was yet.
Loaded
HENRY SAT through one of Nash’s meetings and then lingered after all the kids left. Miranda wasn’t in, and Nash realized he had spent the evening wondering why. He had been waiting to talk to her all day. It had always been this way with women and Nash. He rarely felt struck, but when he was he would discover the woman somehow insinuated into the deep reaches of his psyche in some complicated way. She became an essential component of his well-being. He was glad Henry was there to distract him.
Henry drank his beer lying out on top of the common table. Nash put on some very old Appalachian folk music (Harry Smith’s Anthology that Sissy burned for Miranda and Miranda lent to Nash) and started to shut the place down for the night.
“How come you are never around anymore?” Nash said. Henry shrugged. He looked thinner than ever. He smelled of old beer and cigarettes.
“Do you think it’s possible—” Henry started.
“What?” Nash said. Dock Boggs was singing about honey and sugar through some fast banjo.
“Nothing.” Henry finished his beer and pulled another from the six-pack. “Hey, it’s your birthday, isn’t it? You’re fifty now.”
“Not till next week,” Nash said.
“Happy birthday, man.”
Nash waved it off.
“Here’s to fifty,” Henry said. “The beginning of the end. I feel every minute of my fifty-two years, I swear it, I wear them every day.”
“It’s funny, I don’t feel fifty,” Nash said.
Henry turned on his side, propped his head on his hand and studied the flyers on the table.
“I’m turning fifty, and it is just now dawning on me that I have limited time,” Nash said. “No kidding. I always felt my life was circumscribed, but I believed it was because of me, because of the choices I made. Now I realize — and only now, I am ashamed to say — that my life is circumscribed by definition. We are all circumscribed by the finite terms, you know? There is a whole world of things I missed out on and will never experience. Whatever I have done, there is an endless amount I have not done. Do you know what that tells me?”
Henry shook his head.
“It tells me it is not meant to be this all-encompassing journey. It is not meant to be catholic or encyclopedic. By now I have carved some grooves in this life. A few. What I need to do is hunker down and make those grooves deep and indelible. Not the time to dig new ones, you know?”
Henry sat up. “I guess. But.”
“The time now is for depth. Make that grab for profundity.”
“But.”
“Yeah?”
“What if they are the wrong grooves? What if you made mistakes? Shouldn’t you try to make it right, no matter how late it is?”
“Well, of course.”
“Hey, can I ask you something?” Henry said.
“What?”
“Do you know what kind of plastic explosive works best with a delayed fuse?”
Nash stopped midswig on his beer and looked sideways at Henry. “No, I don’t know the answer to that. Why do you want to know?”
“Nothing. It’s just information I’d like to have, you know, in case. I thought you might know because you seem to know a lot about plastic.”
“Right. The explosive isn’t really made of plastic. HMX and RDX are nitroamine explosives. They are combined with a plasticizer, like mineral oil. The binder and stabilizer is made of a plastic precursor, like styrene, but not the explosive substance itself. It is called plastic explosive because it is in malleable form.”
“Okay.”
“Because it has plasticity.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Cellophane
“YOU REALLY shouldn’t drink Coke. It’s like totally underwriting American corporate hegemony to buy Coke,” Miranda said.
Nash nodded and swallowed. “I prefer to call it a bottled soft drink. Or the Coca-Cola Company. I never call those companies Coke or Pepsi. Or McDonald’s Mickey D’s or the International House of Pancakes the IHOP. They’re not my friends. Why should I call them by nicknames?”
“Bottled soft drink, huh?” Miranda said.
Nash nodded. “There’s a generic movement — never use brand names. It’s a kind of mental hygiene.”
“No Kleenex. Facial tissue.”
“Right, no Q-tips but cotton swabs. No Jell-O. Gelatin dessert. There’s a group called Counter Corporate Contamination. They promote generic nonbrands. They fight the infiltration of brand into everyday language. No ‘fun’ corporate acronyms, no trademarks, and God, no nicknames.”
“There isn’t really a group for that, is there?” Miranda said.
“It’s more difficult than you might imagine,” he said.
“No exceptions?”
“Well, there are always some exceptions. Some names are so perfect, so apt, so electrifying with promise and eponymous in an almost magical way that to not use their names would be to deny some delight and truth to the world.”
“Such as?”
“Cellophane.” Nash folded his arms. “Cellophane. It’s beautiful. Much better than plastic film wrap. And it was also appropriated as slang for a drug — a kind of LSD on dissolvable squares of film.”
“And we know what a big fan you are of appropriations. But guess what? So was Coke.”
“Yeah, but Coke is a motherfucker’s drug. And cellophane is also obsolete. It has been defunct for years. Dupont’s Cellophane was overtaken by Dow’s Saran Wrap. Which by the way was made of polyvinyl chloride instead of cellulose, so it was a much more synthetic plastic than cellophane. With an inferior name. Cellophane is a failed and defunct brand, so I’m not promoting anything when I use it. Which, admittedly, is not very often. But mostly I give it a pass because it is beautiful.”
Miranda was lovely. It was true. Nash woke on his fiftieth birthday, and this was the first thing he thought. She didn’t quite realize it. She almost did but not to what extent and why.
The night before, Nash had watched her having a conversation with one of the late-teen testers at the store. She was smiling and talking, but the kid just looked over her shoulder, unsmiling, half-nodding. Nash remembered being a late teen. He wanted to shake the guy, grab him by his ripped jean jacket and shake him, tell him, Look, would you, look and notice please, let yourself see how beautiful this woman is, how perfect, what a masterpiece with her soft thighs and her bitten nails. If only he knew at nineteen what he knew now about how to love a girl like Miranda. To not be scared she might want things from you. To want her to want things of you.