Miranda furrowed her brow and gnawed at the edge of her fingernail. She had the raw, swollen nail beds of a chronic biter. It was always these self-devouring types who ended up here, hating Nike. (Nike, like Starbucks, originated in the Northwest and then exploded in horrendous global ubiquity. The local kid culture obsessively focused on these formerly local corporations. They had a sense of entitlement when it came to making them targets, even as they still loved and desired the products on some level, too. That love seemed to increase their desire to undo the corporations that made them. It used to be you had to make munitions to piss people off. Now it was enough to be large, global and successful. That made it a more radical, systematic critique, Nash thought. And more futile, naturally.) Nash figured there were worse ways for these kids to expend their anger and energy. Way worse ways. So he listened to them rant and plot against Nike, and it was good.

Nash’s feelings, then, were complicated when he witnessed this repeated, petty theft: D.D.’s person as crypto rich, the object as base, and the shamelessness of the grab right in front of him. Nash also knew he would just suck it up and absorb the loss. Henry would tolerate it, he would make it up some other way. Because Nash would rather jeopardize the existence of the whole enterprise than bust this kid. Not because he didn’t like confrontation but because he absolutely refused to be a cop of any kind. It really would be the last thing he would ever do. He was certain that the tiniest choices altered the world as significantly as larger choices. It was through accumulation that people gradually became unrecognizable to themselves. He would sacrifice a lot not to become an enforcer.

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.

Was it the same group with different names, or different groups with the same members? Each meeting always started with a demand that all cops and media identify themselves and be excused from the meeting. It seemed at first genuine, then a little self-aggrandizing, and finally, she realized, after the third week, to be a parody of left-wing paranoia, to ridicule the people who imagined they were constantly surveiled or infiltrated. But she couldn’t be sure—it was all those things at once. They were planning to participate in some test or another with hundreds of other groups. Whatever antiglobal or anticorporate event that would occur. They discussed dozens of actions and prankster-type tests: pirating public-space surveillance cameras, infiltrating and disturbing business associations, staging website virtual sit-ins, performing seemingly ad hoc “plays” in malls and other retail environments. They planned to dress in suits and pass out dollar bills in Pioneer Square to the shoppers. They discussed defacing billboards and prancing nearly naked fat women in front of Barneys to ask people as they entered or left if there was anything available in their size. Always they were anticorporate. Mostly they were funny and absurd. And they wanted, it seemed to her, to point out the contradictions that had become so normalized in people’s eyes.

As I sat at Gage’s feet—black light hurting my eyes, listening against my will to the perverse whispers of Bryan Ferry—I wondered if my life was going to be one immersion after another, a great march of shallow, unpopular popular culture infatuations that don’t really last and don’t really mean anything. Sometimes I even think maybe my deepest obsessions are just random manifestations of my loneliness or isolation. Maybe I infuse ordinary experience with a kind of sacred aura to mitigate the spiritual vapidity of my life. But, then again, maybe not.

As soon as I got home from Gage’s, I threw on the record I longed to hear. Listening, I reconsidered my earlier despair—no, it is beautiful to be enraptured. To be enthralled by something, anything. And it isn’t random. It speaks to you for a reason. If you wanted to, you could look at it that way, and you might find you aren’t wasting your life. You are discovering things about yourself and the world, even if it is just what it is you find beautiful, right now, this second.

I am a person, I think, who feels comfortable in my isolation. Even someone like Gage (who is someone with whom admittedly I have a lot in common, a person with whom you might think I would enjoy keeping company) doesn’t alleviate my feelings of loneliness. The effort it required just to be around him and tolerate him made me even more lonely. I am at home only in my own personal loneliness. The thing of it is I don’t necessarily feel connected to Brian Wilson or any of the Beach Boys. But I do, I guess, feel connected to all the other people, alone in a room somewhere, who listen to Pet Sounds on their headphones and who feel the way I feel. I just don’t really want to talk to them or hang out with them. But maybe it is enough to know they exist. We identify ourselves by what moves us. I know that isn’t entirely true. I know that’s only part of it. But here’s what else: Lately I find I wonder about my mother’s loneliness. Is it like mine? Does she feel comfortable there? And if I am comfortable with it, sort of, why do I still call it loneliness? Because—and I think somehow she would understand this—you can have and recognize a sadness in your alienation and in other people’s alienation and still not long to be around anyone. I think that if you wonder about other people’s loneliness, or contemplate it at all, you’ve got a real leg up on being comfortable in your own.

ALL-NEW PVC-coated, pressure-sensitive, UV-resistant flexible-face vinyl. A building wrap, a bulletin. Not a billboard. This plastic hugged and clung to the brick face. And it was enormous, the whole wall of a building, with one hole for the lone window on that side. It upset Henry that they couldn’t even bother with painting anymore. The quaint ghost signs still visible fifty years later on the old brick. No, this was a computer-generated image, sleek and instantly reproducible. But not, at least, immune to the effects of a Stanley knife, a pair of decent bolt cutters, or any bladed implement. In fact, it was a fairly low-tech endeavor to cut these vinyl wraps down. But physically it was demanding—the sheer size of the job, the time constraints on accomplishing it, the low light available to do the work required—all conspired to nearly undo Henry.

Three times Henry undid their ad: the beginning of May, the end of July, and on September 3, his birthday. And three times the same ad was restored. They were in a dialogue, a private battle of wills. Go ahead, Henry thought, I got nothing but time. But it wasn’t true. Clearly they would outlast him. And what would he have accomplished? It wasn’t an appropriation. A displacement. An edit. A postmodern modification or improvement. A détournement. None of that. It was just his get-gone will. And it was his undeniable, get-gone need.

She made an odd discovery—no one asked her anything. She had her carefully worked-out tale of love lost—just enough Bobby to ring true. She realized or guessed that one day she would get to the point where she wouldn’t even know what was true and what she had made up. So she wouldn’t be lying any longer, even though some of it wasn’t true. Someday time would turn the lies into history. But she wasn’t there yet, a long way from it. Fortunately there was a kind of restaurant code that ignored people’s past. There was the dinner or lunch prep time, but talk was of baseball, or the song on the radio, or gas shortages, or the president, or how expensive rent was, or the guy in the news who killed his wife and two small children. No one said, “Caroline, why are you here?” “Where is your family?” “How old are you?” “What is your mother’s maiden name?” “What is your Social Security number?”

“She’s a slob. She has this flower child gluttony about her. It’s a waste of energy,” Mel said without hesitating. “You get the sense that she wants the easy way out of everything.”

“That’s a pretty shallow extrapolation. Do tough people have to look tough?”

Mel fixed her eyes on Caroline. “If you look tough, you get treated a certain way and it helps you become what you want to be.”

“You want to be tough?”

“Hard, in fact. Immune to the whims of the body. And what weaknesses I have are my own business.” Mel turned away, and Caroline knew the conversation was over. Mel had such certainty. But she didn’t rant, she didn’t bluster. Caroline admired that. Mel somehow escaped being smug because she didn’t say more than she had to. Rants always make it seem as though the person ranting is desperately trying to convince himself of something. Or maybe the ranter becomes so interested in the rhetoric of what he is saying that convincing is beside the point. It is just about language and pattern and repetition. And the rush of words and adrenaline as it all spills out, exhausting any opposition with an overload of words. Mel was not evangelical in this manner.

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.