Dana Spiotta - Eat the Document

SCRIBNER
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2006 by Dana Spiotta

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Spiotta, Dana, [date]
Eat the document : a novel / Dana Spiotta.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3619.P566E18 2006
813'.6dc22 2005054050

ISBN: 0-7432-8899-8

Visit us on the World Wide Web:
http://www.SimonSays.com

To Robert Spiotta and Emmline Frasca

PART ONE: 1972

By Heart

PART TWO: Summer 1998

Jasons Journal

Antiology

Nepenthex

Safe as Milk

Vespertine

Jasons Journal

Night Ops

PART THREE: 19721973

Speck in the Cosmos

Less and Less

Sunday Morning Coming Down

PART FOUR: Fall and Winter 1998

Jasons Journal

Contraindicated

Agit Pop

Loaded

Cellophane

Without Mouths

Im with the Bandwidth

Visitors

PART FIVE: 19731980

Bellatrix

Temporary Like Achilles

Dead Infants

PART SIX: Spring 1999

Ordnance

Jasons Journal

La Chinoise

PART SEVEN: 19821999

Rules of Engagement

Revolutionary Acts

PART EIGHT: 2000

Ergonomica

Tourists

Jasons Journal

Tracers

Augury

Jasons Journal

Consolation

PART NINE

Contrapasso

Last Things

Jasons Journal

Acknowledgments

About the Author

IT IS EASY for a life to become unblessed.

Mary, in particular, understood this. Her mistakesand they were legionwere not lost on her. She knew all about the undoing of a life: take away, first of all, your people. Your family. Your lover. That was the hardest part of it. Then put yourself somewhere unfamiliar, where (how did it go?) you are a complete unknown. Where you possess nothing. Okay, thenthis was the strangest parttake away your history, every last bit of it.

What else?

She discovered, despite what people may imagine, having nothing to lose is a lot like having nothing. (But there was something to lose, even at this point, something huge to lose, and that was why this unknown, homeless state never resembled freedom.)

The unnerving, surprisingly creepy and unpleasantly psychedelic partyou lose your name.

Mary finally sat on a bed in a motel room that very first night after she had taken a breathless train ride under darkening skies and through increasingly unfamiliar landscape. Despite her anxiety she still felt lulled by the tracks clicking at intervals beneath the train; an odd calm descended for whole minutes in a row until the train pulled into another station and she waited for someone to come over to her, finger-pointing, some unbending and unsmiling official. In between these moments of near calm and all the other moments, she practiced appearing normal. Only when she tried to move could you notice how shaky she was. That really undid her, her visible unsteadiness. She tried not to move.

Five state borders, and then she was handing over the cash for the roomanonymous, cell-like, quiet. She clutched her receipt in her hand, stared at it, September 15, 1972, and thought, This is the first day of it. Room Twelve, the first place of it.

Even then, behind a chain lock in the middle of nowhere, she was double-checking doors and closing curtains. Showers were impossible; she half-expected the door of the bathroom to push in as she stood there unaware and naked. Instead of sleeping she lay on the covers, facing the door, ready to move. Showers and bed, nakedness and sleepshe felt certain that was how it would happen, she could visualize it happening. She saw it in slow motion, she saw it silently, and then she saw it quickly, in double time, with crashes and splintered glass. Havent you seen the photos of Fred Hamptons mattress? She certainly had seen the photos of Fred Hamptons mattress. Theyd all seen them. She couldnt remember if the body was still in the bed in the photos, but she definitely remembered the bed itself: half stripped of sheets, the dinge stripe and seam of the mattress exposed and seeped with stains. All of it captured in the lurid black-and-white Weegee style that seemed to underline the blood-soak and the bedclothes in grabbed-at disarray. She imagined the bunching of sheets in the last seconds, perhaps to protect the unblessed person on the bed. Grabbed and bunched not against gunfire, of course, but against his terrible, final nakedness.

Cheryl, she said aloud. No, never. Orange soda. Natalie. You had to say them aloud, get your mouth to shape the sound and push breath through it. Every name sounded queer when she did this. Sylvia. A movie-star name, too fake sounding. Too unusual. People might actually hear it. Notice it, ask about it. Agnes. Too old. Mary, she said very quietly. But that was her real name, or her original name. She just needed to say it.

She sat on the edge of the bed, atop a beige chenille bedspread with frays and loose threads, in her terry-cloth bathrobe, which shed somehow thought to buy when she got her other supplies earlier in the afternoon. She had imagined a bath as bringing some relief, and the sink into the robe afterward seemed important. She did just that, soaked in the tub after wiping it clean. Eyes trained on the open door of the bathroom, and careful not to splash, she strained to determine the origins of every sound she heard. She shaved her legs and scrubbed her hands with a small nailbrush, also purchased that day. She flossed her teeth and brushed her tongue with her new toothbrush. She tended to the usual grooming details with unusual attention: she knew instinctively that these details were very closely tied to keeping her sanity, or her wits, anyway. Otherwise she could just freeze up, on the floor, in her dirty jeans, drooling and sobbing until they came and got her. Dirt was linked to inertia. Cleanliness, particularly personal cleanliness, was an assertion against madness. It was a declaration of control. You might be in the midst of chaos, terrified, but the ritual of your self-tending radiated from you and protected you. That was where Mary figured a lot of people got it wrong. Slovenliness might be rebellious, but it was never liberating. In fact, she felt certain that slovenly and sloppy attention to personal hygiene surrendered you to everything outside you, all the things not of you trying to get in.

The TV on low, she looked but barely watched, hugging her knees toward her. Unpolished clean nails, uniform and smooth. Legs shaven and scented with baby oil, which looked greasy but smelled powdery and familiar. She inhaled deeply, resting her face on her knees and drawing her legs closer. She was a tiny ball of a human, wasnt she? A speck of a being in the middle of a vast, multihighwayed and many-sided country, wasnt she? Full of generic, anonymous and safe places just like this one.