Eat the Document Read online

  “You shouldn’t charge less than a dollar. It devalues things,” he said, not looking at Nash and sniffing the surface of the book. “People won’t respect things if they think you are giving them away.”

  “That is totally wrongheaded. You don’t know what you are talking about,” Nash said. Josh looked at him, his mouth now slightly open. He still held the book. “I mean,” Nash said, softening his tone a bit, “I refuse to accept that.”

  Josh leaned down to the table so his face was close to Nash.

  “Why didn’t you stop him?” he said in a low tone. “I’m sure you saw what he did.” Nash scrutinized the next book in his pile.

  “That kid lifted a magazine. Why didn’t you stop him?”

  Nash marked a price on the inside cover of the book and then recorded it on his clipboard list.

  “By the way, that’s a very mildewed book, you know,” he said, pointing with his pencil at the book Josh still held.

  “You saw him. Stealing. I know you did.”

  Nash pushed the dollar back at him. “Thing is, I can’t sell you a mildewed book. It wouldn’t be right. You can have it.”

  Josh didn’t move.

  “Just take the book. It’s yours.”

  Nepenthex

  HENRY QUINN wore his mechanic coveralls. At 1:45 a.m. he moved quickly across a parking lot on Third Avenue. The streets were quiet but not at all dark. This didn’t concern him. After several nights in this street at this time, he knew that very few people passed by. Very few cars passed by. The only time he had ever seen a police car in the area was at 2:30, and then only in pursuit of someone at some other place.

  It was a cool early summer night, but Henry was already sweating in his coveralls. He pulled a black watch cap off his head and put it in his side pocket. He kept his head shaved, and when he looked up at the side wall of the building, deep furrows formed in the skin where the back of his head pushed into his neck. A pain shot down into his shoulder. He couldn’t remember when his neck and back didn’t hurt. He wanted a drink and to lie on his bed with the odd-shaped neck pillow and the heating pad. He walked onto the side street perpendicular to the avenue. The street banked steeply to a series of alleys leading to Elliott Bay, and he could smell the ancient midnight damp from the Sound behind the buildings at the bottom of the hill. Most of the street light came from the illuminated billboard attached to the brick side of the building that faced the side street. The vinyl face of the billboard had enormous sans serif letters that spelled Endurit and Abiden. The legend underneath read:

  Cutting-edge psychopharmacology in the new

  Nepenthex Pairing System:

  what gets you through the longest nights

  and the hardest days

  He couldn’t help hearing the liquid-toned voices of the television ads for the two drugs, the man’s voice saying “longest nights,” the woman’s voice, barely overlapping the man’s, saying “hardest days.” Underneath the letters there was a picture of two curved and interlocking pills in a pink, luminous chiaroscuro that glowed in virtual three dimensions in the spotlights. Under that, in smaller letters, it said:

  Ask your doctor if the Nepenthex System of

  Endurit and Abiden is right for you

  Henry stared for a moment, unable to stop himself from either reading the board or hearing the mellifluous voice of the woman from the TV ad. He stood and waited, sweating. At precisely 2:00, the lights on the board timed out. Henry tried to take another deep breath, but already it was difficult, and he walked away from the board to a fire escape that led to the roof. He tied a rope to one of the metal bars holding the board to the building. The board didn’t have a ladder attached like most billboards. He hooked himself to the rope with a carabiner and attached it to a thick nylon belt around his legs and waist. He pulled at it and then walked to the edge of the building. He dangled the rope down the front of the board. Up close he could see it was thick vinyl sheeting. He took out a large retractable-blade knife. He lay on his stomach and slammed the knife into the corner, pushing it until it punctured the surface. He struggled to pull rightward, cutting the vinyl across the top. White, powdery dust that smelled of new plastic puffed out from the cut vinyl and filled the air by his head. He felt his lungs close as he inhaled. Fumbling with the zipper on his coveralls, Henry fished out his inhaler just as he was about to pass out. He sucked on the inhaler, lying on the roof and staring at the night sky. He felt the cold, wet spray of the Sound blowing faintly on him. He could see the blue-black of the water from up here. He wanted to go back to his house and take a pill and fall asleep. But he reached again into his coveralls and pulled out a bandanna and covered his mouth and nostrils. He very slowly resumed his cutting of the vinyl board.

  He had considered every possibility—and certainly the idea that he shouldn’t remove the vinyl from the wall but add to it instead. Some smart riposte to the ad. He’d seen others do it. The Gap Kids board by the freeway. The picture was of some beautiful Asian toddler in a pink corduroy hat. It just said “Gap Kids.” But someone, or some group, pasted under it, in exactly the same font,

  made for kids, by kids

  He admitted it was clever. Smart-aleck clever. But to Henry that kind of addition made it all just a joke, a way of showing off that you had the technology to match the font. And the wit to torque their intentions. That you could hijack their ad through your own savvy mastery of ad language and technology. Leave that to these ad-addicted kids. Didn’t it just pile onto the general noise and garbage? Besides, was that even true about the child labor? Well, probably it was.

  After he finished cutting the top, Henry used the rope to slowly rappel down the front of the billboard, cutting the vinyl as he lowered himself.

  The vinyl sheeting came down over him as he cut. At the very last cut he pulled himself off to the side and watched the whole sheet bend forward until the picture faced the building and the wall was clear. Henry was exhausted, his arms were shaking. There was no way he was climbing back up. He looked down at the vinyl sheet hanging below him. Its bottom edge was maybe five feet from the street. He loosened the hook from the rope and climbed down the vinyl. At the bottom he jumped the last five feet. He landed fine, actually, no pain at all. He stepped back from the building and looked at the gray brick.

  At last, he didn’t have to look at it. Henry pulled off his face scarf and breathed in the night air. He started to shiver. He pulled his fingers out of the finger holes of his gloves and balled them together for warmth. He stared at the brick face one more time. It was only after he started to walk to his car that he realized his face was wet. Salty drops streamed down the creases by the corners of his eyes and into his mouth and dangled from his chin. His vision blurred. Henry sighed. Christ.

  Safe as Milk

  MIRANDA’S LIFE changed over the course of the summer. After years of static inertia throughout high school, everything at last came alive, fluctuated, became constantly inconstant. Miranda often tried to trace the whys and hows and ways of it: the way she met first Nash; then how she met Josh; how it could all be traced back to the Black House, to her friend Sissy; and also, or maybe particularly, to the long days of the Northwestern summer, when not only did the sun shine every day but it would stay light until nearly ten o’clock at night—ten o’clock—and it would feel as though the city spun extra hours just for serendipity, or even destiny, depending on how she looked at it.

  That summer held a particular glow because it was the first time she left her mother’s house in the suburbs to live on her own in the city. It began when one of those things occurred that she thought only happened to other, more interesting people. She made a connection, walked into a score of a connection: a friend offered an available room in a house on Capitol Hill, the alternative, funky-even-for-this-funky-town neighborhood. And not just a room in any house but in the Black House. Miranda met her while she browsed in Shrink Wrap, a used-music store specializing in vinyl LPs.

  Shrink Wrap was un
believably located in a suburban colossus called the Bellevue Mall: a formerly upscale, ’80s mall-boom monstrosity with sponge-painted pink-and-gray cement pillars, now exclusively occupied by second-string retail stores. All of Miranda’s life she had watched the decline and tawdry aging of something designed to be extra new and perpetually now. Like the rapidly aging housing developments that surrounded it, the best Bellevue Mall ever looked was the day it was built. Time could add nothing to it. But here, somehow, in this now lower-rent environment sat Shrink Wrap, the sister store of a relentlessly obscure vinyl-and-CD store in the University District. Because of its remote location in the suburbs, Shrink Wrap developed a reputation for unpicked-through merchandise and became a magnet for hard-core obsessives and music geeks. In addition to their vast stockpile of vinyl, they also sold old cassette tapes, which were becoming trendy among adolescent boys again despite their inferior technology. Gradually that became the theme, the hook, of the place: outdated technology for young kids who already saw the vanguard in the past, the recent past, and not just in content but in format. Miranda liked that; she found it vaguely subversive, and besides it was the only place of interest in the whole suburb.

  Her big break happened, or began, as she flipped through the LP bins one afternoon. LPs lent themselves to browsing. Unlike a CD’s, their substantial covers could be examined. Unknown music could catch your eye and force you to take a closer look. She picked up an old Captain Beefheart record, Safe as Milk. She thought she might buy it because she liked the title. They should name the record store Safe as Milk. They could name the whole suburb Safe as Milk. She always did that, thought of new names for things. If you discover the appropriate name, not only does the named thing change but your relationship to the named thing changes. It becomes within your grasp. While she held this LP, she thought, This is a Long-Playing record, which people play on high-fidelity stereo systems. She could see the outline of the record itself through the shiny cardboard sleeve. As she regarded it—it had weight—a girl with emphatically girlish Heidi braids approached her.

  She had short, blunt bangs, cut well above her highly plucked brows, and two jet-black braids wound tight starting behind each ear, each with bright green yarn braided in and tied with knotted bows at the ends. And not the skinny yarn that you would use for knitting but that thick, fat yarn Miranda had only ever seen in kindergarten, yarn so fat kids with fat fingers were able to tie it. The girl’s braids evoked in Miranda a rush of disconcerting nostalgia: she thought of glitter in clumps, ashy blue construction paper and abstract dreamscapes of tissue paper, confetti and pasta shells. Miranda held her own long hair in one hand, pulling it straight, staring at the girl, who was now speed-talking (sniffling, jaw grinding, practically spark shooting). Miranda’s breath quickened, and she felt a general ache that made her want something from or with this girl.

  She wanted to show Miranda a clip on her laptop computer. She had ripped the entire Captain Beefheart box set, obtained somehow at no expense, including a digital video encoded on one of the CDs. She opened the computer on the front counter, and they watched a tiny Captain Beefheart shimmy and jam his way through a song on a French beach in 1967, with his Magic Band, zany freaks with a tight monster-blues sound, but blues with a fractured acid filter. The girl introduced herself as Sissy Cakes. She quickly told Miranda how she had just broken up with her much older girlfriend, and she had been on a three-day binge of partying and all-nighters ever since, so don’t worry if she seemed to be hypered out. Miranda had heard of her, or read about her somewhere. Sissy described how she belonged to a performance/test group that had attempted and failed to shut down the Bumbershoot arts festival at the Space Needle each of the past three years. “They totally ghetto any local, noncorporate artists.” She also wrote a music column for a local free paper. She explained how she made no money, but it was okay because she lived very cheaply in an old Victorian house off Fifteenth Avenue in Capitol Hill. And then she said it, there was a room opening up—maybe Miranda wanted it.

  Sissy’s house was known around town as the Black House. This was for two reasons: it was, in fact, painted black, and it also housed various black blockers, or want-to-be black blockers, kids from depressed rural backwaters and nearby college towns who came up for shows or political tests and demonstrations, and they were free to crash wherever space was available. The Black House was a squat but a benign quasi-squat. It was condemned but still standing. The people who lived there paid rent to the guy who owned it, but just enough not to get in trouble for trespassing. One day he would tear it down, but meanwhile he collected money on the sly and didn’t do anything to keep it up. It had running water and electricity but no heat. The large L-shaped wraparound porch was still in pretty good shape, despite the kids forever perched on its rails and balusters. The house had a secret feel—it was set back from the road and hidden from view by large red maples growing in a row across the front yard. This kept the sun off the walkway to the house but also created an odd canopy of drizzle-edged dryness in all but the most dramatic downpours.

  The asymmetrical entryway led to two connected parlors on the right and a stairway with a wobbly, oft-ridden-and-climbed banister to the left. One parlor was used as a bedroom; the other, with pretty triptych bay windows, was used as the common room. Which meant it was always covered with sleeping bags of crashers and visiting friends. There was one lone couch: a formal-looking Empire-style thrift store find. The upholstery was ripped and the wood scratched by the three cats that lived in the house. And although there was a makeshift coverall on it composed of an Army blanket further covered by a batik red-and-white throw (which could well have been someone’s abandoned sarong left after a party and made part of the decor by happenstance), Sissy quickly warned Miranda that she would get fleas from reclining on it. “That is if you are the type of person fleas like.”

  Miranda moved there in mid-May, bringing only two suitcases of clothes and a cheap boom box. Her room was on the second floor, toward the back. It actually had a little anteroom attached to it, and someone had hung black beads in the threshold between the two rooms. With candles lit and her futon on the floor, it was practically paradise. Her main room even had its own dormer window, with black shutters that were permanently nailed open. It looked out over a side alley and beyond that Fifteenth Avenue. She could see a streetlight through tree branches outside the window, hear people talking as they walked by at all hours of the night, and she couldn’t quite believe she lived in such an exciting place. Her first night she could barely sleep thinking about the whole city around her and actually residing right in the middle of it all.

  The morning after her first night she discovered it wasn’t necessary to sit on the couch to get fleas. She scratched frantically at her ankles. She woke early, stumbled out of her room half asleep and went to the kitchen to make coffee. She found three sniffling teenagers huddled by the stove. The electric oven door was pulled open and the heat on full blast, as well as all the burners on the stovetop, the coils glowing in the dark. The kids leaned over, warming themselves. The early morning air could barely be called chilly, but they rubbed hands along skinny arms, sniffling in self-pity and surprise at how they actually had to huddle for warmth—they were like real poor people, they really were. Later she would learn that the kids who did a lot of methamphetamine, or various other speed-type drugs, were often freezing, skinny and sniffling. She just stepped over them and hoped they didn’t set the house on fire.

  With the exception of the heat, which was an issue a few months a year, or in the early mornings or late nights of early summer, when enough partying and all-nighters might give someone the chills, and despite the various infestations of fleas, mice, roaches and cats, there were few other major deprivations at the Black House as Miranda saw it. The bathrooms on both floors worked, she had her anteroom and dormer window, and it was still, under it all, a good old house. But more than that, Miranda was certain it was a special place that might help shake the subu
rbs off her forever.

  As they sat on the porch sharing a hand-rolled cigarette of tobacco and hash, Sissy told Miranda the impeccable pedigree of the Black House. How everyone knew the house, and how it was actually notorious in youth circles. It had existed for years as condemned but lived in, first in the late ’80s and early ’90s as a crash pad for rock kids (a strange conglomeration of Olympia and Eugene hipsters, fat girls with attitudes, post-grunge scenesters, and finally latecomer vultures). Now it was overrun with straightedge anarchists, militant earth liberators, vanguardist pop culture pranksters, and hybrid testers and toppers from the very same hinterlands and suburbs. But no matter who lived there, the whole house smelled perpetually and deeply of tobacco, cat piss and Nag Champa incense.

  There were no rules, but a few things were clearly not forgiven, depending on who dominated or paid the rent at any given moment. Most recently things were under the sway of a particularly humorless cadre of radical animal liberationists. Consequently, the food one found around was vegan and soy and free from animal traces. There was a big sign in the fridge indicating that out of respect for the vegans, the top two shelves were to be kept entirely meat free. The currently ascendant cadre also tried to make the Black House into a more formal experiment in group living. In addition to rules, they organized house meetings to divide chores and make group purchases of bulk food items. Sissy laughed it off. The house seemed fated to resist order, what with more and more baby anarchists camping in the parlors and hallways. Miranda followed Sissy’s advice and put a padlock on her door. She soon discovered whatever food she put in the refrigerator was ipso facto communal and took her toothbrush and towel back into her room each night and each morning. The Black House was both the cushiest squat and the worst legit apartment she could ever hope to find. Paradise, though—pure post-suburban paradise for a girl like Miranda.