“He did it all right.”
“Well, thank God that’s cleared up. All this time I’ve been wondering.” She said this earnestly, and there was a pause, and then she began to laugh. And I laughed. Which was surprising. She finally turned to leave. Then she stopped and looked back at me.
“Why, though?”
“Why what?” I asked.
“Why would Hiss do it?”
“Who knows? He certainly didn’t make any money from it. I guess because he believed it was the right thing to do.”
“So why are you writing about the Hiss case, it being generally known and all?” She was quite serious again, not laughing. I looked at her, and I don’t know why I said this, but I did.
“I’m curious about him. The fact that he spied isn’t so remarkable. Or even that he was in a position to lose so much privilege. I find that sort of admirable if misguided. What I find amazing is how he lied his entire life. How well he lied. If it wasn’t for the facts, it would be quite convincing. How does a person manage to not crack his entire life? Not even on his deathbed?”
She stood there, and she looked right at me, an open-eyed look.
“I mean if something is worth doing, shouldn’t you admit doing it? Shouldn’t you take responsibility for your actions?”
She looked a bit startled. “Maybe other people would suffer if he confessed it,” she said.
“Maybe. Or maybe he regretted it.”
“That’s very possible.”
“Or maybe he was a coward,” I said.
And then it passed, she was backing up a bit, then moving down the hall.
“I made some chicken quesadillas. You just have to heat them up.”
“That’s great, thanks.”
She turned away. But I stayed in my doorway a moment more.
“I wonder, you know, about whether his wife knew the truth. Or his friends.”
She stopped again and looked at me. “And what conclusion have you come to?” she asked.
“No one knew the truth. He didn’t even know anymore, maybe. To live that long with it, you must have to convince yourself it never really happened. Don’t you think?”
She shook her head and shrugged. She looked weary and old and far away. “I don’t know,” she finally said. We were weirdly awkward, not our usual awkward. She said, “You’re a bright kid, aren’t you?”
My mother is a stranger. And she is strange. I am not sure at all what she thinks or feels about anything. And it’s funny because she should be wondering about me, not the other way around. I should be thinking about rock-and-roll and girls and drugs. Not why she gets so fuzzy and confused sometimes.
I retreated to Gage’s house. He was on some kind of one-night George Clinton — Funkadelic kick. Which meant we had to listen also to P-Funk All Stars and Parliament, and every tributary that leads to and from these bands. What other albums they were session musicians on, what songs of theirs were covered by other people. He put on Maggot Brain from 1971, an admittedly awesome album. The cover alone — an Afroed black-power chick screaming and buried up to her neck in sand. And smokin’ psychedelic funk, very heavy and druggy sounding, with a swell of flange and fuzz at the edges. It had a creepy menace about it still, particularly a drop-dead sad and lovely extended guitar solo on the first song. Gage naturally whipped out a joint. I can’t smoke, it doesn’t make me feel good. It makes me confused and overly deliberate. But I smoked anyhow, and the music became claustrophobic and frightening.
“You know what this music sounds like?” Gage said.
“What?”
“It sounds like his mother just died.”
I looked sideways at Gage. What did he mean by that? What was his point? The wail of guitar got longer, more extended and further from the melody. Did it go on forever? Could it please just return? It was all too dark for me, so I begged off and went back to my place to listen to Pet Sounds (the original mono version on vinyl). I put on the old-fashioned headphones with the oversized foam-filled ear cushions and lay on the floor. And I let the Beach Boys’ choir voices wash under and over me until I was in a gloriously unfractured universe of exquisite, naïve beauty.
Sometimes I think I am in love with my own youth. I do not want to go forward, I always want to be carelessly lost in this music. I never want to get sick of it, and I never, ever, want to outgrow this or anything. I certainly don’t need to know anything more about her.
La Chinoise
NASH HADN’T seen Miranda in several months. He had heard rumors that Miranda was moving east with Josh, or had already moved east. She finally resurfaced for a meeting of the Last Wave Cinema Collective, one of Prairie Fire’s underground art and ecto-provo groups. Nash didn’t organize the group, but he let the participants show their films and collect what they could at the door. The unfortunate thing, in Nash’s view, was how lousy most of the work ended up being, how boring: painfully didactic and too often satiric in the most shallow way — just the sort of satire that reinforced oppressive American cultural hegemony rather than challenging it. Nash figured bad films, particularly bad attempts at political or subversive statements, were so unappealing they were not just sad and depressing but counter-revolutionary, reactionary, practically on the payroll of status quo America. He gave no — absolutely no — credit for “heart in right place” or “attempting with limited resources.” He felt insulted by lousy films.
But tonight Nash found himself doubly irritated and unable to resist glancing over at Josh sitting there next to Miranda. The lights were lowered, and someone showed a video of two G.I. Joe dolls, one dressed like Saddam Hussein, the other, Michael Jackson. It was a nonstarter, a stoner’s idea of social critique. Afterward, the “filmmaker” held a forum.
“So, any comments? Obviously, this is just a rough cut. We are going to get ten minutes together, then hit the festivals, get some backers to put up money for digital animation, Avid, Pro-Tools and Flash formatting.” He wore wire-framed, narrow oval glasses low on the bridge of his nose and his black hair long and spiked straight up in sticky, unmoving finger pulls. A tattoo of an overwrought ivy strand riddled with viciously drawn thorns started at his neck, disappeared under his shirt until it reached his forearm, then wound painfully to encircle the delicate bones of his wrist. It looked as if a killer plant had crawled under his clothes and was stealing around his limbs to strangle and devour him. Nash found the tattoo distracting, and he couldn’t really even look at the kid after a time.
“I think that doll stuff is played out. I remember seeing Barbie doll reenactments of historical events back in the early ’90s,” said Sissy, looking very sober with two neat, tight braids and precision-cut bangs. Oversized vintage aviator-shaped glasses overwhelmed her face and would have evoked low-budget porn movies if the lenses had a sunset tint, but since they were clear glass and obviously prescription, they seemed more like something a middle-aged serial killer would wear. Nash realized this was precisely the look she was trying to achieve, and he couldn’t help taking some pride in the fact that he could “get” it. Because most of the kids recognized her as a writer for the more underground of the local weekly magazines, when she spoke they regarded her as an absolute authority. Of course she only had a music column, but still, she was attached to the media, so everyone treated her as if she might bestow some instant fame on any one of them. There was nothing these kids respected like media connections.
“The copyright infringement stuff with Mattel or Hasbro that inevitably happens with any Barbie or G.I. Joe reference is also sort of pointless. No one is going to let you show the thing publicly, but you can naturally put the cease-and-desist letter in your press packet and try to get some cred that way, I suppose. But it has to get a lot of notoriety to overcome the fact that it won’t really be seen.”